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The Colonel had known, from the moment he saw her leave, that she would not be weeping. Although, she was shaking, which might be called very much worse; she was standing in the cold night air with her arms clasped tight about her body and her whole frame trembling, as a horse trembles after a hard gallop, and she did not turn her head when he came up.

He looked at her and spoke ever so gently, “Miss Bennet.”

Her head flung up, and she saw him approach. “Do not, Colonel,” she pushed out, holding up a hand.

The Colonel moved closer, taking each step more slowly. He had both his hands raised in defense, and said, “I should like to explain.”

“I think you had better not.” She drew a long breath. “I think, if you explain, I shall say something I should regret.” Elizabeth took a deep breath. “My name,” she said. “My name, Colonel, was said aloud in a barn. By a woman who thinks I am a thief.”

“Miss Benne,” he tried again.

“No. I have been made an objective, sir. And now I am a family quarrel.” She was vexed at the situation, and above all, embarrassed.

The Colonel knew it, and she knew it, and he had never in his life felt so entirely without defence; this was one of the few experiences that the profession does not provide for. He stood in the dark with his hat in his hand and looked at a young woman who was shaking from head to foot with a justified and perfectly controlled fury, and understood, quite precisely, what he had done. He did not speak.

“I am going home,” said Elizabeth at last. “I shall walk. Mrs. Collins will see that Mr. Collins is told I was taken ill. Please do not follow me. And please.” Her voice wavered. “Please do not send your cousin.”

The Colonel nodded. “I shall not.”

Elizabeth looked at him once more, then went down the dark lane toward the church tower with her head up and her skirts gathered in one hand, a small straight figure fading into the dusk, and the Colonel stood and watched her go until the dark had quite taken her.

Then he turned, and found that Darcy was standing at his elbow. He had not heard him come. He was standing perfectly still, in the shadow of the cart-shed, with his coat open and his hat in his hand and his face turned toward the lane. In the light from the barn door, Richard could see that he was white to the lips, and that the hand which held the hat was clenched so tightly that the knuckles stood out like pebbles.

“She is angry,” said Darcy. It was not a question.

The Colonel exhaled loudly and put the bunt of his palms to his eyes. “She has every right.” And then, he shook his head. “Fitz, I am sorry.”

“Do not be,” said Darcy. His voice was very low. “I have been a great deal sorrier for a great deal less.” He turned his head, and the light fell across his face, and the Colonel saw that it was not rage that he saw there. It was something far worse. It was the look of a man who has, in a single evening, been forced to the edge of everything he fears, and has found at the bottom of it only the fact that he has hurt her.

Darcy turned and walked down the darkened path to return to Rosings just then, leaving the Colonel behind, standing in the dark outside a barn, with the sound of a hundred people dancing in his ears, and understood for the first time in his life that there are some objectives which cannot be taken, and some which should never have been tried.

CHAPTER 14

Darcy had not gone to London. He had ordered the carriage at midnight, and stood in the hall of Rosings with his greatcoat on and his valise at his feet, and waited for it to be brought round. It had not come. The coachman, a sensible man of long service, had taken one look at the face of his master’s guest and decided that the horses had a cough.

At two in the morning Darcy had taken off his coat, and walked out into the home park in his shirt-sleeves, and covered six miles of wet grass in the dark without once looking where he put his feet. He came back at dawn with mud to the knee and his mind made up.

He found the Colonel in the east parlour, shaved, dressed, and entrenched behind a pot of coffee with the air of a man who has been awake all night composing a defence. There was a sheet of foolscap folded beside his plate. Darcy knew the hand, the large clear drill-sergeant’s capitals, even upside down.

“Sit down,” said Richard. “Before you say anything. I wish to say something first.”

Darcy looked up at the ceiling and shook his head and said, “No.”

“Fitz!” Richard had tried to interject, but Darcy would not let him continue.

“I have been walking for five hours,” said Darcy, “and I have worked it out.” He turned to his cousin, who was looking quite concerned, and said, “You will hear me out, Richard.”

He did not sit. He crossed the room and took the foolscap from beside the coffee-pot, and unfolded it, and read it standing. Beneath the first objective, now struck through with a single decisive line, there ran a column of numerals in the Colonel’s hand. 2. Secure private conversation, no witnesses — DONE (garden). 3. Establish mutual acknowledgment of error — DONE. 4. Public occasion, proximity. The fourth had been underlined. Beneath it, in a smaller and more hurried hand, was a fifth, which Darcy did not read to the end.

Richard threw the paper on the fire, and it curled, and blackened, and went up in a bright flat sheet. The Colonel half rose and sat down again. Neither of them said a word until it was ash.

“That is the end,” said Darcy. “No more of it. No letters through Charlotte. No accidents, no coincidences, no occasions. I shall not arrange to be in a room where she is, and I shall not arrange for her to be in a room where I am. I shall not ask her to reconsider, or to forgive, or to look at me.”

The Colonel stared at him. His mouth had set into a hard, thin, unhappy line, and Darcy saw, with a kind of weary clarity, that he was not merely angry. He was grieved. He was a man who had spent twenty years in the belief that a problem, however large, would yield to discipline and persistence and the willingness to go on when everyone else had stopped. It had taken him up the Peninsula. It had never yet let him down. And here was the one objective he had ever wanted for someone else, within a hair of being taken, and the man who most had cause to want it was standing in a ruined shirt in the grey light, quietly calling off the assault.

“You are throwing it away,” said Richard.

“No!” Darcy barked out.