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Though her judgement was sometimes flawed, no one could have criticised Mrs Bennet’s social instincts, and still less her quickness for forwarding a union between any of her daughters and an eligible gentleman. She read the room with keen accuracy.

“Kitty,” she said, rising from her chair with decisive energy and less subtlety, perhaps, than she imagined. “I believe I heard your father call for you.”

“I did not hear anything,” Kitty protested.

“Mary, the pianoforte wants tuning. You must speak to your father about it. Come.”

“It does not want —”

Mrs Bennet would hear no argument. “Now, if you please.” She bustled the girls out of the room with swift determination, brooking no disagreement. Elizabeth watched her do it, feeling an odd mix of mortification for the obviousness of her mother’s designs and gratitude for their results.

Mrs Bennet closed the door behind her with a tact she would never receive full credit for, and the sound of her shepherding Kitty and Mary toward the stairs diminished and was gone.

Suddenly, the room was empty of everyone except Elizabeth and Mr Darcy. The parlour settled into quiet. Grey winter light filtered weakly through the window. The embroidery in Elizabeth’s lap lay still, until, with a sudden, impatient gesture, she picked it up and set it hastily down on the side table.

Mr Darcy had remained standing, surely a sign that he did not intend to conduct the visit in the ordinary way. Elizabeth waited in silence. Come what may, she would allow him the first word; she must.

“All night,” he said at last, “I have been trying to determine the correct way to say what I have come to say. I have not found it, but I am here anyway.”

“I should not have thought you so uncertain,” Elizabeth said softly. Her mouth felt strangely dry. “It is a significant departure from your usual manner.”

“It is.” He looked at her with an intensity she had never seen from him before. “My usual manner has not served either of us especially well.”

Elizabeth looked up at him, rapt and speechless.

“Forgive me. I should have said this to you before. And I ask you now to let me say everything before you respond. I have an unfortunate tendency, when I am uncertain of my reception, to stop before I have finished.” He paused and took a breath to steady himself. “I am fairly uncertain of my reception.”

“I will hear you,” Elizabeth said. “Please.”

He paused a moment longer. “We must have the truth, I think. This engagement was made to protect honour, yours and mine. That much cannot be denied. But there is another, deeper truth, and that is that honour ceased to form the larger part of my reasons for wishing this marriage some time ago.”

Despite her best intentions to let him speak uninterrupted, Elizabeth could not help letting out a small gasp. It seemed impossible that he could intend the meaning she hoped for most, and yet equally impossible that his words could have another interpretation.

“I ought to have told you before,” Mr Darcy went on. “But I thought it was my duty to protect you from the weight of my feelings. From the obligation they might create. I have maintained a distance I told myself was consideration. I think it was also cowardice dressed in better clothes.” He grimaced at his own words.

Elizabeth studied him. Mr Darcy was watching her with the expression she had come to know as his most unguarded. Gone were the careful control and composure. In their place was an expression she suspected to be entirely sincere.

“I believed you were eager to escape it,” Elizabeth murmured.

“I know,” he said. “I understood that too late. And I understood also that I had given you considerable reason to think so. It was the form my care for you took, mistaken as it was.”

He moved to the chair across from her and sat, looking deeply into her eyes. “Tell me what you believed,” he said. “All of it. I would rather have the accurate version than the comfortable one.”

Elizabeth clasped her hands together and considered this. “I believed that the engagement was an obligation you were discharging with more grace than I had any right to expect. That the consideration you showed me was what was due to your honour, not due to any more personal feeling.” She paused. “I heard you speaking to Mr Bingley at Netherfield. I did not intend to overhear you, and I heard more than was fair to either of us.”

Mr Darcy nodded, looking pained. “What did you hear?”

“You spoke of forced smiles, of duty.” Elizabeth spoke as steadily as she could, feeling it was better to say it firmly. “I believed you to be concerned for my sense of obligation. As well as feeling trapped by your own.”

“I was concerned — for you,” he said, leaning forward in the chair. “I believed you regretted the engagement, despite its social utility. Despite the risk.” He looked at her. “Do you regret it?”

Elizabeth looked at the fire for a moment, giving herself a moment to be truly honest with herself. With him. “No,” she said, turning back to him. “Not then. Not for some time before then, if I am honest, which I appear to be this morning.”

The quiet that followed was not the edged silence of recent weeks, but something different. It had the quality of a room in which two people have spoken with complete honesty, doing away with all pretense or navigating around the other, and now must reconcile what lay before them.

“You thought me indifferent,” Mr Darcy said gently.

“I did,” Elizabeth admitted. “I believed you to be a man of honour, attending to all the proper forms of respect, in direct opposition to his own feelings.”