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He looked at her then, and shook his head gravely. “You cannot be.”

She shook her head. “No.”

He added, “No one can,” and then paused, and said seriously, “I suppose that is rather the horror of it.”

He was silent a moment. A thrush was singing somewhere in the limes, a long cool liquid phrase, over and over above them.

“I was taught,” he said slowly, “that a man mastered his feelings. My father believed it, and I believed it for twenty-eight years. And when I stood in that room at Hunsford, and for the first time in my life the thing came up in me that could not be put away, I did not know what to do with it. So I did what I had always done. I armoured it, and I made it into a speech. I had so much to say, and I was so afraid of it, that I let my pride talk instead of my love. And it talked.” He paused and said soberly, “It talked in conceit for ten minutes.” He looked down at his hand; the one he hit the wall with in anger that dark night; his scars were nearly healed. She saw them, pale and hard, across the palm.

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. “I will not be managed,” she said.

He nodded slowly. “I know.”

“Nor bought, nor persuaded, nor made to feel that I owe you anything because of what you are. If I am ever your wife, Mr. Darcy.” She stopped. She had not meant to say it. But, it was out, and so she decided to continue, rather faster, with her colour rising. “If I am ever anyone’s wife, I will be a person. I will say what I think, and I will tell you when you are wrong, and I shall expect you to hear it. I could not live in a house where I had to be careful.” Her pulse beat faster.

He knew her meaning instantly, and was ashamed she said it. “You will never be careful in mine.” He sounded gentle and then he turned, and looked straight at her, with the plain, grave, tired, steady eyes. “I have nothing grand to offer you. I can only say that you have a right to expect better of me than you have had, and that I intend to spend the rest of my life earning the trust you may choose to give, but I will not do it by speeches.” He shook his head and let out a little scoff just then, “I think I am done with speeches.”

The thrush had stopped, and the air was very quiet under the limes.

“Do you intend,” said Elizabeth, rather unsteadily, “Do you intend to propose to me again?” She felt her own heart beat rapidly, and could hardly fathom her boldness in the face of Mr. Darcy.

Darcy was silent for a long moment. She watched him. She watched the pulse in his throat, and the hand close slowly at his side, and the muscles of his jaw work, as they had worked in the barn, and in the parlour, and on the day he had put his shoulder under a broken chaise.

“I should like to,” said Darcy, swallowing; she saw the apple at his throat move. “If you wish to hear it.”

She stared into his eyes, though her bottom lip was whimpering slightly before she said, “I do.” The words were hardly words at all. But he heard them just the same, and she saw him hear them; she saw them go through him, slowly, like warmth through frozen ground.

Then he did a thing she had not expected. He went down on one knee in the gravel, in his muddy boots, in the green light, and did not take her hand, and looked up.

“Elizabeth,” he started. It was the first time she had heard him say her name aloud and it sent a shiver down her back.

“I said once that my feelings would not be repressed. I was a fool.” He paused, trying to think what to say next, and finally resolved himself. “I love you. I do not say it because you are clever, though I think you are the cleverest person I have ever known, or because you are brave, or because you laugh at me. I say it because I have never in my life wanted to be better, and I want it with you. I admire your mind. I would rather quarrel with you than agree with anyone alive. I want a marriage in which neither of us has to pretend to be less than we are.” He stopped, and swallowed, and said the rest very low. “Will you marry me?”

Elizabeth watched the scene unfold before her. And, what she saw was nothing but a man on one knee in a garden, with his hands open, and his whole heart in his face, who would, she knew, stay there in the gravel until it grew dark, and then get up, and bow, and say good night, if she told him no. She had never been so sure of anything. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, I will.”

He got up. He did it slowly, like a man who is not sure his legs will hold, and stood before her, and she put out both hands, and took his. They stood beneath the limes with their hands joined and neither of them able to speak.

The light had gone to gold; it lay along the walk in long slanting bars, and the birds were beginning their evening noise, and somewhere very far off a gate clanged. Darcy raised her hands, one after the other, to his mouth, and held them there a long moment, with his eyes shut. Then he bent his head, and kissed her.

He kissed her tenderly, adoringly even. He was gentle at first, but, soon there was in it the whole force of a thing that had been held in, since he had first met her in Meryton, a hard rough shaking undercurrent, as of a great river held back by a very thin wall; and she felt it go through her to the heels, and put her hands up to his face, and held on.

When it was over she did not step back. She leaned her forehead against his, and stood there, breathing, with her eyes closed; and then, for no reason at all, she began to laugh.

“What?” said Darcy, rather hoarsely.

“I was thinking just then about a a country dance in Meryton, a ballroom at Netherfield, a Colonel behind a door. You on a barn roof. Me with a hen-pan. And all of it to bring us to a walk of limes in Derbyshire, in August, as though we had planned it.” Her voice was light and lovely.

He laughed then too. “We did not plan it.” He shook her head, his forehead rubbing against hers.

“No,” she exclaimed in a laugh, which he felt against his face. “And that is what is so ridiculous, sir.”

He laughed again; it was a low, rusty, helpless sound, as of a thing long out of use, and she felt it shake through his chest. Elizabeth realized that it was the first time she had heard him laugh so freely; nothing held back, and it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

All the while, unbeknownst to the happy couple, in an upper window of the east wing, partly concealed by a curtain, a man in a regimental coat had been watching for some time. He had not meant to. Indeed, he had come out on to the landing to look for a book, and the window was there, and the long walk of limes lay below it like a stage; and the Colonel, who had spent fifteen years training himself to notice such things, had seen two figures stop under the trees, and one go down upon one knee.

He had stood quite still and had watched the whole of it, the hands, the mouth, the long still moment with the foreheads together. He stood with his arms folded and a look of profound, glowing, unmilitary satisfaction spreading slowly over his square plain face. Well, thought Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam, that is a campaign.

The whole ordeal had been, he reflected, a model of its kind. A difficult field in a hostile position. There had been a cautious advance, a masterly retreat, a decisive engagement at the critical hour. He had not lost a man. In fact, he had the whole thing worked out in his mind already, as a despatch, with the dates, and a modest paragraph about the commanding officer’s foresight. He could think of three different ways to mention his own part in it at dinner.