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"Lowe," I say, "the blue coat as well."

"Yes, sir."

"Darcy. Did you hear me?"

"I heard you." I take a neckcloth from the drawer and hand it to Lowe. "I leave at first light. I should be obliged if you would tell Bingley. I shall write to him from Pemberley and thank him properly for his hospitality."

"Pemberley."

"It is my house. I am told it is very fine."

"Damn your house." The Colonel throws his hat on the bed. I have known him twenty years and I have never seen him throw anything. "You cannot simply ride away. Not like this. Not after what you said to her."

"What I said to her was the truth. I released her from an engagement she never made. I did it before her father, so that there should be no doubt. I asked that the fault be given out as mine." I take another neckcloth. "I fail to see what more any gentleman could do."

"You could listen to her."

"I did listen to her. For six weeks. With great attention."

The Colonel draws a breath.

"I was there, Darcy," he says. "From the first morning. I was in that breakfast parlor at Rosings when she told me. She was sitting by the window with mud to her knees and your letter in her lap, and she had been crying, and she said Colonel, Mr. Darcy and I are not engaged, and she said it as though it cost her blood. She was going straight up those stairs to tell you. I watched Pettigrew stop her."

"I know."

"And I watched her afterward. Every day. I watched her at your bedside when you asked her to tell you how she said yes. She looked as though she were being stretched on a rack. I watched her come back from one of your walks in the park, white as a sheet, because you had tried to tell her about Georgiana and she could not bear to let you, knowing she already knew." His voice is rising. "I saw her when you showed her that letter to Bingley. I was coming back along the corridor, and she was standing at the end window with her hands over her face, crying as though her heart would break. She did not see me. I made sure she did not."

I stand still with the neckcloth in my hand.

"I watched it change," he says, more quietly. "Somewhere at Rosings. I cannot tell you the day. One morning she was holding your arm on the terrace as though it were a duty, and the next she was holding it as though she could not bear to let go. I watched her stop pretending, Darcy. I watched it happen. Long before Oakham Mount. Long before this."

"Then you watched me too."

He stops.

"You watched me," I say. "Every day. You stood by the window in my aunt's bedchamber and listened to her tell me how I knocked over a workbasket, and you said nothing. You heard me tell her I would rather be laughed at by her than admired by the whole world, a speech I never made, and you looked at the ceiling. You let me tell you about Bingley in my aunt’s blue bedchamber, about saving him from an imprudent marriage, the very thing she threw in my face at Hunsford, and you turned to the window so I should not see your face." My own voice has not risen at all. "I thought you were moved. I thought you were proud of me. You were sorry for me."

"I was both."

"I do not want either."

The Colonel looks at me for a long moment. Then he sits down on the end of the bed, heavily, beside his thrown hat.

"You are going to ruin both your lives," he says, "for the sake of your pride."

"It is not pride."

"What is it, then?"

I look down at the neckcloth in my hands. I fold it. I fold it again.

"Do you know what it is," I say, "to have been happy? Truly happy, for the first time in your life? To have woken every morning for six weeks glad to be alive? And then to discover, in a quarter of an hour, in a garden, that every moment of it was a kindness someone was doing you? That you were not loved. You were managed."

"She loves you."

"She says so." I give the neckcloth to Lowe. "She has said a great many things. I have no means of knowing which of them she meant."

"I know."