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Mrs. Reynolds smiled and crossed to the window. Elizabeth returned to her chair, put the needle securely through the edge of her work, and took up an old card of white thread from her basket. While Sally fetched a better match for the gown, she might mend the torn corner of a handkerchief. An end had caught beneath several turns. She pulled at it, made the difficulty worse, and stopped.

“Loose the binding,” she murmured.

Nothing happened to the thread. Mrs. Reynolds, however, turned from the window so quickly that Elizabeth looked up.

“What did you say, miss?”

Elizabeth’s fingers closed over the card.

“Only that I have made a knot.”

“I heard what you said. Forgive me. I meant to ask where you had heard those words.”

The housekeeper’s expression had changed. She was not smiling now, and her attention to the card in Elizabeth’s hand made the room seem suddenly less private than it had a moment before.

“They are ordinary enough words,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes, miss.”

Mrs. Reynolds waited. Elizabeth could hear someone coming along the passage. She had never been so glad of an interruption, or so vexed by her own relief.

Sally entered with the thread. Elizabeth thanked her, asked whether Jane had sent for her, and learned that Mrs. Bingley was sitting with her husband and examining some drawings which had arrived that morning. The news supplied no reason for Elizabeth to leave her room.

When Sally had gone, Mrs. Reynolds folded the damaged curtain cord over her hand.

“My grandmother used to say them,” she said. “It surprised me to hear you.”

“While she was sewing?”

“Sometimes. I do not know that it ever helped her sewing.”

Elizabeth looked at the thread in her own hand. Since the blue ribbon had moved, she had twice taken Jane’s bag upstairs under quite unnecessary pretences. Upon both occasions she had made it behave exactly as a workbag ought. A week of ordinary failures should have persuaded her to forget the one occurrence which she could not explain. Instead she had begun to suspect that she would remember it at the most inconvenient moments for the rest of her life.

“Did your grandmother tell you where she learned them?”

“From papers which belonged to her family.”

Elizabeth put down the card.

“I heard them in a dream.”

Mrs. Reynolds did not reply at once. Elizabeth would almost have preferred a small, comfortable laugh.

“I know how foolish that sounds,” she continued. “I should think very little of it if somebody else told me the same thing. But I wrote them down the following afternoon. I have the paper here.”

She opened her desk and drew the scrap from beneath her father’s letter. Giving it to another person felt more serious than writing it had done. Until now she might have burned it and left nobody the wiser.

Mrs. Reynolds read the three words, then looked at her.

“Was there anything tied?”

Elizabeth’s heart beat more quickly.

“There was thread across my hand. Red thread. Someone was ill, I think. I could hear her breathing.”

“Did you see who spoke?”

“No.”