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“Loose the binding.”

Nothing happened.

Elizabeth waited. The bow remained a bow.

After a little while she tried the words once more, feeling so foolish that she glanced toward the door before speaking. Again, the ribbon did not stir.

Sir appeared in the passage. He stood looking at her, evidently expecting an invitation.

“If you have come to see me untie a workbag, you are too late,” she told him.

He entered and put his head upon her knee. Elizabeth rested her hand between his ears. The warmth and weight were reassuringly ordinary.

“I should be obliged if you did not tell anybody.”

His response was to lean harder against her until she was in danger of losing her seat.

She laughed, but the sound did not quite steady her. It would have been easier if the ribbon had moved again. Then she might at least have known that she had seen it properly. Instead she possessed an impossible recollection and a perfectly unremarkable workbag.

Elizabeth untied the bow with her fingers, put the collar inside, and carried the bag downstairs to Jane.

Her sister thanked her without noticing anything unusual. Charles was reading a letter aloud. Caroline had noticed that the agent gave no distance to the nearest market town and insisted that he should be made to supply it before they considered the house. Mr. Darcy stood near the window, listening.

Elizabeth took her usual chair. She could not tell Jane that she had been giving instructions to a ribbon. She had no wish to supply Caroline with another reason to question her judgment, and the thought of asking Mr. Darcy for an explanation was intolerable. She could scarcely determine what she thought of him without inviting his opinion of her senses.

That afternoon, when she went upstairs, she wrote the remembered words upon a scrap of paper and put it beneath her father’s letter.

She had not decided what to believe. She did not intend to forget exactly what she had heard.

Chapter Nine

BY THE SECOND Sunday in September, Darcy no longer expected to find his breakfast room empty when he entered it. Jane’s workbasket stood beside her usual chair; Charles left newspapers folded at the articles he meant to discuss; and Houndsmere had discovered that Miss Bennet generally came downstairs last and might therefore be persuaded to let him into a room from which he had already been expelled.

Their visit had lasted more than a fortnight. Darcy had ceased asking each morning whether Mrs. Bingley was comfortable. She told him when she wished for something, and Charles had begun speaking of a November nursery as readily as he spoke of the next day’s weather.

There had been letters from two agents and another from Longbourn, which Miss Bennet read to Jane upon the terrace. Darcy had heard her laughing through the open window. Later she had told him that her youngest sister had borrowed a bonnet and returned it with different trimmings, denying that any alteration had been made. He had laughed, too, before remembering that such moments of ease never lasted long.

They could speak of books or her sisters very agreeably. Let him offer some particular attention, and she became a guest who would not inconvenience her host. He had stopped asking whether she wished to accompany him upon his walks.

On September 12, he was answering Pritchard’s latest particulars when Mrs. Reynolds came to tell him that Miss Bennet wished to speak with him.

He laid down his pen rather more readily than the unfinished sentence required.

“Is she in the drawing room?”

“In the hall, sir. Mrs. Bell is with her.”

Darcy rose. “Has something happened?”

“There was rain in her kitchen last night.”

He remembered the steward’s list. The mason had looked at Bell’s chimney after their return from Highwood Lodge and undertaken to return with stone for the repair. At that time, Hammond had reported a small damp patch after rain. Water in the kitchen was another matter.

“Show them in, please. And send to Mr. Hammond’s house. Ask him to come when he can.”

Miss Bennet entered first, followed by a small woman in a dark bonnet whom Darcy recognized at once. Widow Bell had lived in the cottage below the orchard since before his father’s death. She carried a basket covered with a folded cloth, and was more concerned about placing it where it would do no harm than about addressing the master of the house.

Darcy moved a chair forward.