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Richard knew it was very nearly the truth. That was what made it so painful to be accused of. He found that his jaw had set, and that he was looking at his aunt with a flat, steady hardness which, if he were honest, he had learned from the man at present out on the Westerham road. It was a curious thing, how a quality catches.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I am going to say two things, and I should like you to hear both. The first is that Miss Bennet is a lady, by birth and by conduct, and that I have never met a young woman who had less need of anyone to put her in anyone’s way. She has refused to be put. I know it, because I tried.”

Lady Catherine drew a sharp breath, but Richard would not let her get a word in. “The second is that my cousin is eight-and-twenty years old, and master of the largest estate in his county, and has been these six years, and that if he chose to walk to Hunsford every morning and back every night it would be a matter between himself and his conscience. It is not yours, ma’am. Nor mine. He has a right to choose his company.”

She pushed forward from her chair and all but yelled. “He has a duty!”

“He has both,” said the Colonel, “and I should not like to be the man who tells him which comes first.”

She was silent. The long face had gone a dull mottled red under the cap, and the Colonel saw, with a purely professional interest, that she had begun to think. It was a rare sight. It was not, he reflected, an altogether reassuring one. She was a woman who, once she had made up her mind to a purpose, had never in the course of sixty years been known to retreat.

“I shall speak to Darcy,” said Lady Catherine.

The Colonel’s voice went low and he replied wearingly, “I should be very careful, ma’am.”

His Aunt scoffed and said rather righteously, “I have never been careful in my life, Richard.”

“No,” said the Colonel, with feeling. That is what I fear, he told himself.

As expected, Lady Catherine spoke to Darcy that evening, in her own sitting-room, with the door shut and the candles lit and the Colonel sitting in the corner by an arrangement that neither of them had remarked upon.

The Colonel had not been invited. He had simply come, at the moment the footman went to summon Darcy, and taken a chair by the fire, and opened a book; and Lady Catherine, who would have turned out any other man, had looked at him once and let him stay. It was the nearest she had ever come to acknowledging an ally.

Darcy came in as he came into any room: without haste, without apology. He had changed for dinner; he wore black, and the plain white linen made his face look harder and thinner than it had a fortnight ago. He had a long shadow along one cheekbone where he had been in the sun. Richard saw him look once at the arrangement of the chairs, and once at his cousin, and read the whole situation in an instant, as he always did.

“Aunt Catherine,” said Darcy with a formal bow.

She marked her command. “Sit down.”

Darcy knew the tone, and knew he was in for a challenging time. “I think I shall stand, ma’am.”

He took up his position beside the mantelpiece, with his shoulder against it and his hands clasped behind him, and Richard thought, with a flicker of something between pride and fear, that he had never seen a man look less like a person who is about to be lectured. It was the posture of a man at the head of a firing-line. It was very quiet. It was entirely without insolence. It was simply the stance of a man who has decided in advance what he will and will not give.

“I am told,” said Lady Catherine, “that you have been seen a great deal in the neighbourhood of Hunsford.”

Darcy, with one arm propped on the mantelpiece turned slightly towards his aunt and simply said, “I have.”

She replied, with more vigour, “I am told that you have been in the company of Mr. Collins’s cousin.”

Darcy nodded slowly. “On two occasions. I will say three, if you wish to be exact.”

Her voice rose just then, and Darcy and Richard sensed her anger growing. “You will tell me what is the meaning of it, Darcy.” This was not a request, it was clearly a demand, and both gentlemen knew it.

Darcy inhaled slowly and then exhaled before he spoke. “I will tell you what I did, Aunt. I went to see a tenant of yours who had been cheated by your agent. I helped a stranger who had a broken leg. I spoke to Miss Bennet on each occasion because she was there. That is all I will say about the meaning of it, ma’am, because I do not know what it means.”

His reply was perfectly quiet, and perfectly flat, and for one second the Colonel could have sworn he saw the old woman’s mouth twitch. Then she put down her hand upon the arm of the chair so hard that the lace on her wrist shook.

“Darcy,” she said. “I shall ask you one question, and I desire a truthful answer. Has that person been in your thoughts?” Lady Catherine’s eyes had narrowed, and she looked ready to pounce.

The room went very still. And, the Colonel thought about the silence just then. There is a kind of quiet that a soldier knows, in the instant before a gun goes off. He sat with a finger marking his place in a book he had not read a line of, and found that he was holding his breath. This was the moment; he knew that this was the point on which the whole of the campaign, if it had any sense, must turn. One word. No. One small, easy, social lie, such as a man tells a hundred times a day, to spare an old woman’s feelings and secure his own ease, and the thing was done; Lady Catherine would retire satisfied, and the three weeks run out in peace.

He looked up and saw his cousin, who was looking quite intently at the carpet. Richard saw his cousin’s long jaw tighten and a hand behind his back. The hand closed, slowly, upon the other, and he knew with certainty then, what Darcy was going to say, in the same instant that Darcy knew it himself.

“Yes,” said Darcy finally, lifting his head from the carpet to look directly at his aunt.

Lady Catherine drew in her breath through her nose; rage clearly building within her.

Darcy did not stop there. “I will not lie to you, ma’am,” he said. His voice was low and quite even. “You asked me a plain question. She has been in my thoughts. I do not intend to say more, and I do not intend to be asked. But I will not stand in your room and say a thing that is not true, in order to be comfortable.”