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“My grandmother used to speak as though it belonged to this place. She did not say that all my family possessed it. None of us could do what you have done.”

“Then I need not have been Elspeth.”

“No, miss. I do not see that you need.”

Elizabeth let out a breath which surprised her by shaking. Mrs. Reynolds pushed the little cup of tea nearer, and Elizabeth drank before she trusted herself to speak again.

She was Lizzy Bennet. She had quarrelled with Lydia over a bonnet and corrected Kitty’s accounts for a ribbon purchase; she knew which chair her father would choose even in a room he had never visited, and which cough her mother employed when nobody attended to her. Those things had not become less real because a woman long dead had hidden a journal behind a window seat.

“I should have thought of it sooner,” she said.

“You have had cause to be frightened.”

“And cause to laugh at myself. I prefer that part.”

“We might have managed with fewer hens.”

Elizabeth laughed. It was a relief to find that she could do so without wishing the journal out of existence.

Mrs. Reynolds drew the box of threads toward them. “Shall we try a little?”

They had put aside a length of ordinary linen tape. Elizabeth tied a loose knot, laid it upon the table, and took her hands away. At her first attempt it drew tighter. She stopped, rested her palms upon her knees, and waited for the eagerness to leave her fingers.

She thought of the turn she wanted loosened. This time she did not pull at it in her imagination as though she might drag it into obedience.

“Loose the binding.”

One loop eased. The free end crept back through it, and the tape lay crooked upon the table.

Mrs. Reynolds smiled.

Elizabeth was tempted to attempt it again at once. Instead she picked up the tape, tied another simple knot by hand, and asked the housekeeper to place it where she could not see it.

“That will be harder, miss.”

“I know. I should like to know how much harder.”

Mrs. Reynolds set it behind the thread box. Elizabeth tried, failed, and tried once more. When they moved the box, the knot remained exactly as Mrs. Reynolds had left it.

Elizabeth considered it without the despair she would have felt a fortnight earlier.

“Then I must see what I am doing.”

“For this, at least.”

“Yes. We must not make a rule which the next accident will immediately contradict.”

They put the tape away. Mrs. Reynolds wrapped the journal, and Elizabeth took up her father’s books. She ought to have felt easier in every respect. She had found a means of thinking about the dreams which did not require her own life to have been an illusion. Yet one question had become more troublesome precisely because the rest appeared clearer.

She waited until Mrs. Reynolds had shut the box.

“Do you think a person might receive more than the useful part?”

The housekeeper looked up.

“Feelings, perhaps,” Elizabeth said. “As well as words and pictures.”

Mrs. Reynolds did not answer at once. Elizabeth regretted asking, for she could not explain why it mattered without inviting another inquiry she was not ready to meet.