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“My aunt Gardiner went once,” said Elizabeth. “She says they cut the ham so thin that you could read the newspaper through it. I have always wanted to try.”

“Then you shall have your ham,” he said gravely, “and a newspaper, if you insist.”

The weather held. They crossed the river as the light was going. By the time the footman had found their box, the walks were dim and very crowded, the ladies muffled to the ears in furs and the gentlemen stamping their feet beside the braziers, and Elizabeth had begun privately to think the place a little overpraised. Then a whistle went somewhere in the trees, and every lamp in the gardens was lit at once. They hung in the branches and along the colonnades and over every arch, more than she could have counted in a week. The orchestra struck up in its gilded house. A lady near them cried out in delight, and Elizabeth could not blame her in the least.

She turned and found Mr Darcy watching her instead of the lamps.

“Well, Mrs Darcy? Is it overpraised?”

She had said nothing aloud. “How did you know I thought so?”

“You had the face you wear for Mr Collins's sermons.”

“Then I take it back. Every word I did not say.”

The ham was every bit as thin as her aunt had promised. The arrack punch was so strong that he would not let Georgiana have more than a sip, and Georgiana did not argue, which was not like her. She sat at the front of the box with her chin on her hand and watched the crowd go by. Her cheeks were pink, and once she laughed at something Elizabeth could not see. Elizabeth was glad of it. She asked about the narrow paths that wound away from the lamps into the dark, and Mr Darcy told her they were called the dark walks.

“And what goes on in them?”

“Nothing I would care for my sister or my wife to see.”

After supper the orchestra began a country dance, and couples started to form up on the gravel in front of it. Mr Darcy stood and bowed.

“Will you dance with me?”

She did not answer at once. They had danced together only once before, at Netherfield, and she had spent the whole of it wishing herself anywhere else. She had told Charlotte afterwards that she would sooner stand up with the curate.

“I shall stay and guard the ham,” said Georgiana. “Go on.”

Elizabeth gave him her hand.

She had thought he would dance as he did everything else in company, correctly and without enjoying it. He did not. He was light on his feet and sure of every figure, and when they turned, he took her hand as though he had done it a hundred times. He hardly spoke. At Netherfield she had called that sulking. Tonight it seemed to her that he was attending, to the music and the steps and to her, and that he did not wish to be anywhere else.

Twice, when they met in the set, she caught him looking at her. She knew his proud look. She had studied it for months and could have drawn it from memory. This was not that look, and she had no other name ready for it.

She looked away first. Her face was hot. That was the lamps, she told herself, and the music, and the punch she had hardly touched.

It was over his shoulder, as they turned, that she saw Georgiana.

The girl was not in the box. She was standing at the mouth of one of the dark walks, half in shadow, close beside a man who had his back to the light. He was bending his head down to her, and she was listening.

Then the dance carried Elizabeth round, and she lost them. When it brought her back, the walk was empty. Georgiana was strolling back towards the box, quite unhurried, as though she had only gone to get a better look at the orchestra.

Elizabeth put her foot wrong. Mr Darcy steadied her without a word, and she managed some sort of smile for him.

She said nothing, then or later. The light had been poor and the crowd thick, and she had seen it for a moment only. It seemed a great shame to spoil the first happy evening any of them had had in weeks over a shadow. In the carriage Georgiana hummed the last tune the orchestra had played, and she was asleep on her brother's shoulder before they reached the bridge.

Elizabeth sat opposite and watched her sleep. The man in the dark walk came back to her at every jolt of the wheels.

On Tuesday afternoon she went into the morning room for her sewing and found Georgiana there before her, at the writing desk. The girl was folding a letter very small. She pushed it under the blotter so fast that the corner tore.

“I beg your pardon. I did not know you were in here.” Elizabeth kept her voice light. “Good news from a friend, I hope?”

Georgiana went scarlet. “Only a girl I knew at school. It is nothing, really.” She got up so quickly that her chair went over. “I must practise. Fitzwilliam says I have been neglecting the second movement.”

She was gone before Elizabeth could answer.

A girl's letters were her own business. Elizabeth told herself so firmly, picked up her sewing, and meant it. But the torn corner of that letter had taken its place beside the man in the dark walk, and she could not get the one to stay apart from the other.