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“Walking does not always need to produce something useful.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose it does not.”

Elizabeth looked at the fire again.

Darcy saw her gather something. There was a subtle shift in her expression, the slight quickening of attention that he had come to know as the precursor to her wit, to the angle of observation she brought to things when she was most herself. He watched it assemble, and he waited for it with a smile of anticipation on his lips.

It did not come.

Whatever she had been about to say, she decided against it. The expression settled back into mere pleasantness, and she reached for her cup. The ghost of the woman he had first met walked through the room, taking his Elizabeth’s lightness with her.

It was only a minor witticism, certainly, one she judged not worth saying, and yet Darcy felt its absence keenly.

“The library,” she said after a moment. “Have you been in it recently? I thought I might look in this morning, but I found I did not want to after all.”

“I was there this morning,” he said. He kept his voice level. “With Bingley.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and drank her tea.

She knew. Or she had been in the corridor, or had heard something, and whatever she had heard had produced the pleasant tone and the stalled wit and the careful levelness. He did not know how much she had heard or what shape it had taken from where she had stood, and he could not ask, not here, not with Georgiana at the instrument and Miss Bennet three feet away.

He stayed for twenty minutes, which was the minimum that would not appear a retreat, and then left.

Darcy went to the window at the eastern end of the corridor. It was the closest available point of stillness and a good distance away from both the library and the sitting room, and he needed a moment in which neither of them was immediately present.

Bingley’s sentence still rang in his head.

Her discomfort comes from believing you feel trapped, not from her own reluctance.

He wanted to believe it, only too much. That statement had not loosened its hold. The conversation in the sitting room had not helped him resolve it in either direction. What he had observed was a woman working to be pleasant and not quite managing to be herself, and he could read that two ways and had been reading it two ways for the better part of an hour with no conclusion.

What he could not read away was the stalled wit. He knew that quality, the gathering and the deciding against saying anything at all, because he had watched her choose to be funny in situations where it would have been easier not to be, and the absence of it was its own kind of information. She had been going to say something real and had pulled it back. The pulling back had not looked like someone who did not care. It had looked like someone who cared too much to risk it.

Darcy was at a loss to reconcile his conflicting thoughts. He remained stationed at the end of the eastern corridor until he heard Elizabeth and Miss Bennet exit the sitting room, thanking Georgiana for the afternoon.

He followed them to the entrance hall, weighing whether to speak, and how to achieve a moment’s privacy if he did. He paused on the stairs, not deliberately, but because the tableau below held him for a moment.

Georgiana had already gone. Elizabeth and Miss Bennet were momentarily alone, the servant perhaps having been dispatched to bring the carriage around. He was above and behind them, on the curve of the staircase, and the entrance hall carried sound rather further than people standing in it might expect.

“I cannot bear it,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was low and not low enough. “That he should suffer this engagement when his every action shows he wishes to be released from it.”

He stopped, blood chilling in his veins.

Miss Bennet must have said something. He did not hear it. The words did not arrive. By the time his hearing had adjusted from the shock of Elizabeth’s sentence to the acoustics of the hall, Miss Bennets’s response had already passed through the air and dissolved, and the door was opening, and Elizabeth was moving toward the carriage.

He did not move. He could not move.

He wishes to be released.

She thought he wanted to be free of her.

In that moment he understood, with the painful clarity that arrived too late, that they had been reading each other wrong in perfect symmetry for weeks with complete sincerity and considerable damage.

Darcy closed his eyes for a long moment. He opened them to find that Georgiana had come to stand next to him and was watching the carriage through the narrow window beside the door with an uncertain expression.

“Brother?” she asked tentatively.

“I am well,” he said, which was not what she had asked and did not answer the question he knew she wanted to ask. To his considerable relief, Georgiana accepted it with the grace she brought to things she understood better than she said.