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She had prepared herself for eloquence. The gate was unexpectedly more difficult to bear.

"Was it very bad?"

"Appalling."

"Then I should certainly have liked to see it."

His laugh was quiet. He moved a fallen leaf from the seat, though neither of them had yet decided to sit. That small, unnecessary service steadied her. He was nervous, and still making a place for her.

"I cannot promise that I shall always distinguish my own wishes from what is required of me," he said. "I can promise to listen when you tell me yours. I will not turn a no into a stage on the way to yes. And if you require time, I shall wait without assigning it a chapter number."

A drop struck the bench between them.

They both looked up.

"Not now," Darcy said, with such ordinary irritation that Elizabeth almost laughed. He took out his handkerchief and dried the seat. No gazebo appeared.

"Will you marry me?"

She could have said it at once. Instead she allowed herself the moment he had offered. She imagined a breakfast table at which she might be tired, cross, or silent, and still be wanted. She imagined disagreeing with him, and not losing the right to finish her sentence. She imagined learning the things no outline had considered important enough to tell her.

Then she stepped closer.

"Yes. I will marry you."

He stood very still. "You need not say it merely because⁠—"

"Darcy. I have been waiting a considerable time to answer a proposal I was actually asked. Please allow me the achievement."

"Yes," he said, then laughed at himself. "Of course."

She offered her hands. He took them, lightly at first, and she felt the tremor he had been concealing. It pleased her that the grand proprietor of Pemberley should be so thoroughly undone by a single syllable. It moved her more that he had risked hearing the other one.

"I love you," she said. "Not on account of your income, although I am prepared to make sensible use of it. Not because you are allegedly an ideal hero. You are frequently inconvenient, and your headings occupy too much room. I love you because when I asked you to leave something uncertain, you tried."

His thumb moved once over her glove. He asked whether he might kiss her.

She answered by coming nearer, and then, remembering what they were trying to learn, said yes aloud.

The kiss began without an audience or an explanation. His hand rested at her cheek, warm after the evening air. Elizabeth had expected to recognize a scene she already knew. Instead she discovered the slight hesitation before he drew her closer, and the relief of being able to answer it. She laid her hand against his coat and stayed there until she wanted to lift her face from his.

For a while neither spoke.

At length Darcy picked up the handkerchief he had dropped. A leaf had adhered to it. He folded the leaf into the linen with absent solemnity and put both in his pocket.

"A keepsake?" she asked.

He looked down, realized what he had done, and surrendered the leaf to the path. "An error."

"I am glad you still make them. I should find perfection oppressive."

When they rejoined Jane and Charlotte, Jane looked at their linked hands and asked nothing. Elizabeth told her because she wanted to. Her sister embraced her, and then Darcy, surprising him into a stiffness which gradually gave way to an answering smile.

Charlotte squeezed Elizabeth's hand. "You look very happy."

"I am."

It was not an especially witty answer. Elizabeth kept it.