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“I am certain he would approve.”

“Then it will be an agreeable question to ask him,” Jane replied.

Elizabeth hid her smile behind the book. Caroline saw enough of it to turn to another pile of music with unnecessary attention.

The quiet returned. Outside, a gardener carried away a basket of cut flowers. Sir went to the window to watch him, as though the contents required inspection. Jane asked Elizabeth to ring for tea. It was an ordinary afternoon, made pleasant by her sister’s company and the absence of any demand upon them to do more than they wished.

Elizabeth wanted to describe it to her father. She had begun mentally composing a second letter when she recalled that he could scarcely have answered the first. Their distance from Longbourn could not be shortened merely because she found it inconvenient.

That evening she finished the first half of the novel. The invitation to discuss it had become troublesome. She had an opinion, and knew that Mr. Darcy would probably contradict it in a manner she should enjoy. There was no impropriety in talking about a book with her host. Yet she disliked the eagerness with which she anticipated the argument.

At dinner she answered his inquiry about the story by saying that she had reached the point they had agreed upon.

“And your verdict?” he asked.

“I cannot decide whether the heroine is unfortunate or merely determined to make herself so.”

“That is a severe distinction.”

“She has received three letters and misunderstood every one.”

“Perhaps she was not supplied with all the information available to the reader.”

Elizabeth glanced at him. For a moment the answer struck too near her own difficulty to be entertaining.

“Then the author ought to allow her an opportunity to inquire,” she said.

“Would she use it?”

“She might, if everyone else ceased speaking on her behalf.”

Charles, seated beside Jane, laughed. “I begin to think I have read this book without opening it.”

Jane smiled at her husband. The conversation moved to the letters he had received from the agent, and Elizabeth was spared the necessity of offering Mr. Darcy another opinion.

Later, she wished she had been able to enjoy the exchange for itself. She did not wish to become a woman who could overlook a grave fault because its possessor understood a novel and spoke pleasantly over dinner. Anna was not a character whose circumstances might be arranged to make the next chapter agreeable.

When Elizabeth went upstairs, she put the book away, extinguished her candle, and went to bed. It was some time before she fell asleep.

When she dreamed, she was standing beside a bed. She could not see the face upon the pillow, but she heard the effort of breathing and the low murmur of somebody speaking too softly for the words to be distinguished.

A length of red thread lay across her palm.

Her hands were not idle. One thumb held a loop while the other hand drew the thread through it. Elizabeth tried to look at the fingers, certain that there was something she ought to notice about them. Before she could do so, the breathing changed, and a woman close beside her said, very distinctly, “Loose the binding.”

Elizabeth turned toward the voice.

Elizabeth woke in her own bed, facing the familiar curtain. The words from the dream were still clear in her mind.

For a while she lay perfectly still. The house was quiet. No one was breathing with difficulty; the only sound she could hear was the soft scratch of a branch against the window.

She drew her hand from beneath the coverlet. Her palm was empty.

There had been no cradle, or none that she remembered. The room had been darker than the one in the first dream, and somebody had been ill. She could account for that without difficulty. Mrs. Neale had given her more than enough material for an unhappy night, and she had foolishly carried the story home in her own thoughts after agreeing that Jane should not hear it.

As for the thread, she had been sewing. Jane was always sewing. There was nothing surprising in that either.

What troubled her was the certainty with which her hands had seemed to know their work.