Page 37 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

"He already knows enough to be cautious. I shall tell Mr. Bennet that Wickham is not a man to whom young women should be entrusted — though I cannot demand belief without proof I am free to share, and that troubles me more than I would like."

"My father will listen to you."

"Will you?"

She took several steps before she answered, her eyes on the lane ahead. "I will remember what you have said. And what you have refused to say."

It was not blind faith. Darcy found he valued it a great deal more than blind faith would ever have been worth.

At the stile, Lydia complained that they had missed the officers' invitation to walk into Meryton. Elizabeth sent her home with Kitty, and for once they obeyed without a fight. Elizabeth suspected it was only because Darcy stood beside her, silent and immovable as a stone wall.

"You have frightened them."

"I said nothing at all."

"Your silence has rank, apparently."

"I should apologise for it, then."

"Do not. It saved us all a good ten minutes of argument."

They returned to Longbourn together. Mr. Bennet received Darcy in the library while Mrs. Bennet protested, from somewhere down the hall, that gentlemen did not generally call in order to discuss other gentlemen.

Darcy gave a carefully restricted warning. He stated that Wickham had once attempted to obtain money through deceit, and that he, Darcy, would not trust the man anywhere near Georgiana. He did not reveal the elopement that had nearly followed. Mr. Bennet listened without a trace of his usual amusement.

"You understand, sir, that I cannot repeat further details," Darcy said.

"I understand that a man may protect his sister without supplying entertainment to the whole of Hertfordshire in the bargain. I shall keep my daughters from any private excursions with him. Public acquaintance is rather harder to prevent, as you might imagine, in a neighbourhood this size."

"That is all I ask."

"No, Mr. Darcy. It is all you may reasonably ask. There is a difference, and I would advise you to remember it."

Elizabeth's phrasing exactly, Darcy thought, and wondered, not for the first time, whether she had learned it from her father, or he from her, or whether the two of them had simply always thought alike without needing to compare notes.

As Darcy left the library, he heard Lydia arguing about some assembly in Meryton down the passage. Mr. Bennet's voice ended the dispute outright. A single flat sentence. The warning had already changed something in the house, quietly and at once.

Elizabeth waited for him in the hall.

"Thank you."

"For distrusting a man on your account?"

"For giving my father what you could, without using your own sister's privacy to make yourself more convincing. That would have been the easier path, and you did not take it."

Darcy had not expected her to understand the cost of that so precisely. She had named it, without being told.

Bingley emerged from the drawing room wearing the expression of a man who had been promised happiness but not yet told the date of its arrival.

"We should go," Bingley proposed, without any real conviction behind it.

Mrs. Bennet insisted, at considerable volume, that they stay to dinner. Darcy looked at Elizabeth.

"Will you remain?" she asked quietly.

He did.

Dinner at Longbourn tested his intentions rather more thoroughly than a proposal ever had.