Great houses did not hurry to worship; they proceeded. The carriages were brought round a quarter-hour before they were wanted, and in that quarter-hour, Elizabeth learned more of the household than a week of dinners had.

Mr. Harding had not encouraged Miss Bingley to attempt a carriage on an ankle two days sprained, and Miss Bingley, who could not be persuaded her duty lay anywhere but where she was forbidden, was bearing the prohibition aloud, a lady determined to suffer for not going, while Mrs. Hurst, deputed to stay behind with her, settled a shawl about her shoulders.

“I cannot think it right,” Miss Bingley said, “to keep my chamber on Easter morning, of all mornings. And if Mr. Harding should hear I had been carried as far as the carriage, like a relic, I am sure he would accuse me of defying him.”

“Mr. Harding has prescribed rest,” Mrs. Hurst said.

“And the day has prescribed otherwise. It is a hard thing to be obedient to an apothecary at the cost of one’s religion.”

Mr. Hurst, who regarded Easter chiefly as an interruption of his breakfast, expressed a hope that the apothecary and the day would settle the dispute between themselves and let him know the result.

Through it all Mr. Darcy stood by the hall table with his prayer book in hand and gave his orders as quietly as if no one were suffering near him. Miss Bingley’s fire was not to be let fall; Mrs. Annesley was to take the second cloak, the morning having turned sharper than the window promised; and Mr. Bennet was applied to, with exact courtesy, on which carriage he preferred.

“My preference, Mr. Darcy, is generally for the carriage in which I am least expected.”

“Then I am sorry to disappoint you, sir. You are expected in both.”

Her father looked as nearly delighted as Elizabeth had seen him since they crossed the county line. “Lizzy,” he said, “we are in a dangerous house. One asks it for an inconvenience, and it returns a courtesy.”

They went in two carriages, and the disposition had been managed so exactly that Elizabeth understood at once she had been placed where she could neither assist nor obstruct him. Pride, she had supposed, ought at least to be careless; this variety attended to everything.

The church stood older than the house and a half-mile from it, which had never prevented the house from looking down upon it. The raked lane gave at last upon a churchyard where the parish had assembled to wait without seeming to wait, an art Meryton practiced whenever the Netherfield carriage was looked for. But this was not Meryton’s lively reckoning of income and gowns. The people turned first toward Mr. Darcy, and they regarded him as a man whose existence had practical consequences for theirs.

Tenants made way at the porch without being asked. A girl no older than Lydia dropped Miss Darcy a curtsy and colored as though she had presumed. Mr. Darcy handed down his sister, and then, with the same brief formality, Jane and Elizabeth. His hand was perfectly steady. Hers was less so than she had counted on; she withdrew it the instant the step was beneath her and put the matter from her mind, where it declined to stay.

The rector, Mr. Markham, came forward before they had reached the porch, a thin, solemn man who carried his gravity as carefully as his surplice.

“Mr. Darcy. Mrs. Wilkes bade me thank you for the coals.”

“I am glad they came before the rain.”

“They did, sir. Her grandson carried them in for her.”

“Joseph? The younger?”

“The same, sir.”

“He ought not to have lifted them alone.” The correction was quiet, nearly absent, the remark of a man whose attention had already gone forward to the door. The clergyman received it with the smile of one who had heard such things before and expected to hear them again.

Had Mr. Darcy dispensed his charity with any display, Elizabeth could have despised it and been comfortable. Had he taken the parish’s deference as a thing owed him, she could have called it pride and gone in to her prayers at peace. But he seemed neither gratified by the gratitude nor in want of it. He stood in his own place, and the place answered him. It was the most inconsiderate thing he had yet done to her.

The Pemberley pew made humility a labor. It faced the congregation across the chancel, a step above the village benches, where three generations of Darcys had sat in full view of the people whose welfare they had inherited the charge of. Mr. Darcy took the end nearest the rector, his sister beside him, and Elizabeth past Mrs. Annesley in a seat she had not chosen and could not now exchange. Her father was at her other side, surveying the chancel with the candid interest of a gentleman touring an agreeable foreign country.

The rite was the rite she had knelt to every Easter of her life. Mr. Markham’s sermon, delivered in three carefully separated points, did not hurry either; it proceeded with the same solemn confidence as the house. What was not the same was the manner in which the congregation, when its attention was let off the leash, attended to Mr. Darcy. They did not stare; that would have been improper. They consulted him. Whether to kneel, whether a fretful child might be carried out, whether the cold in the north aisle had been seen to: each uncertainty in the benches traveled up to his pew and went away decided.

He read the appointed lesson, the women come early to the tomb and the stone rolled away, with the plain emphasis of a man who had performed the office every Easter of his life and meant not to spoil it by performing it. Midway through, Miss Darcy’s hand crept into her brother’s, and he gave no sign of having felt it. The village had seen.

A proud man at the head of his own table she had been ready for. A man answerable in a church she had not. At Meryton, he had been a proud stranger, and a proud stranger may be disposed of in an afternoon. Here he was something more troublesome. He was necessary. It was an addition to the case against him she could not in honesty enter on his side, nor in honesty leave off it.

When the congregation rose to go, her father bent his head toward hers. “It would appear,” he murmured, “that Providence has been pleased to lay rather more upon Mr. Darcy than it has thought fit to lay upon you or me.”

“Hush, Papa.”

“I am being scrupulously reverent. The observation is theological.” He took her arm to lead her out, and the pressure he gave it was so slight she might almost have missed it: the touch he used when he had arrived at a conclusion he did not yet mean to share.

In the churchyard the party broke into the pairings the morning had been tending toward. Bingley was at Jane’s side without any visible engineering. Miss Darcy was claimed by a woman in a clean apron, whose child she had asked after by name. And Mr. Darcy was stopped by an old farmer, who turned his hat in his hands and put some question of a fence.

“It is the lower run, sir, by Hartle’s ground. The posts went over in the wet.”

“I will send a man to it in the morning. The corner post wants setting deeper than the last man set it.”

“I will, sir. And thank you.”

“The thanks are not owing to me.” He said it as a man states a fact that no longer interests him; and the farmer, who had plainly heard it before, twisted his hat once more and went content.

By then Elizabeth had given over being surprised that every claim in the place should find him, and that he should always know where each answer belonged.

“Well, Lizzy,” her father said, handing her up to the carriage, “I begin to suspect that Mr. Darcy is one of those men whose chief inconvenience is the prevention of one’s disliking him.”

“Then I shall persevere, Papa, and disappoint the prevention.”

“Do, my dear. It will be excellent practice for you.”

She took her seat across from him and discovered that she had passed the whole of the service not in devotion but in a steady, unwilling study of the man across the chancel, and had brought out of church less of her grievance than she had carried into it.

The carriage took the lane toward the house. “Your mother writes,” Mr. Bennet observed, to the window more than to her, “that she has informed the better part of the county, by way of Meryton, precisely whose guests her daughters are this spring. Lydia adds that no summer can be endured that does not produce a great quantity of officers, and Brighton if it can anyhow be contrived. I confess I am easier in my mind about Mr. Darcy’s gardens than about either correspondent.”

“Lydia would not think so.”

“She would find this parish sadly wanting in regiments.”

Easter dinner at Pemberley made no pretense of being Friday’s table. The Lenten austerity had gone out with the fast; the air over the board was warm with roasting meat after a week of cold fish, a glazed ham bright between the candles. Miss Bingley sat at Mr. Darcy’s right, her ankle preserved upon a footstool, her composure restored. Elizabeth had been placed between her father and Miss Darcy. Jane sat across the table at Bingley’s side, never Miss Bingley’s choosing and plainly Mr. Darcy’s, contrived with the innocent unconcern peculiar to gentlemen who know exactly what they have done.

The first eddy came with the soup.

“Charles,” Miss Bingley said, “do give Mr. Darcy your opinion of the saddle. You are by far the best judge of mutton in three counties.”

“I am no judge of it at all,” Bingley said. He had been telling Jane of a stretch of water he meant to walk her past.

“Bingley,” Mr. Darcy said, “you were describing the lower water to Miss Bennet. It takes a turn near a wood she would do well to see before the leaf is fully out.”

“Oh, so I was.” And Bingley turned back to Jane with the relief of a man fished from the water.

Elizabeth gave her host the polite half-attention proper to a guest. He had managed Miss Bingley with kindness and Jane with care. It was no more than she looked for, and she let it pass.

The second course brought the second occasion.

“Charles, surely you recall the matter of Mr. Pearce’s account,” Miss Bingley said, leaning the least degree toward her brother. “You never settled with me whether the man was overpaid or merely impertinent.”

“I — that is —“ Bingley set down his fork. “I cannot at this moment say. Was there a Pearce?”

“There was certainly a Pearce.”

“Bingley,” said Mr. Darcy, with the air of a man pursuing his own thought, “you spoke last night of fitting up a room for your accounts at Netherfield. The smaller study here is built to that very purpose. Miss Bennet has a good eye for a room’s situation; you might ask her judgment of it before you carry the notion home.”

Bingley brightened. Jane was applied to. The current ran where it had been meant to run, and Mr. Pearce sank without trace. Her father permitted himself an inquiring tilt of the head and said nothing.

By the third attempt Elizabeth had ceased to be civil and begun to be diverted. It came dressed as music.

“Mr. Darcy,” Miss Bingley tried, “you must make my brother own that no one in Hertfordshire keeps a tolerable table. He will not say it to me; he is grown so loyal to the place.”

“I have grown loyal to the place,” Bingley agreed, “and I cannot think why you should wish me cured of it —“

“Miss Bennet was telling me of the Netherfield assembly rooms,” Mr. Darcy said, to no one in particular and to Jane in particular. “The proportions, I believe, are uncommonly good for dancing. You would know, Miss Bennet, better than any of us.”

And Jane knew; and the table tipped once more toward the window-end of itself, leaving Miss Bingley’s opinion of Hertfordshire tables with no one to receive it.

By the fourth Elizabeth had stopped numbering the rescues and saw the pattern entire: a man performing a great labor of host-work before the eyes of the table, badly, and unable to stop.

Mr. Darcy was matchmaking audibly at his own dinner table, and with a visible exertion he had never in his life been known to tolerate in another man.

She looked to her father, who was already looking at her. He returned his attention to his plate; she returned hers to hers; and between them a thing passed that neither was disposed to name, though she came away sure he had read more in her face than she had meant to lend it.

When the cloth was drawn, Bingley made no pretense of wanting his port, and the gentlemen rose with the ladies. Miss Bingley was restored to the sofa near the fire, Mrs. Hurst settling the cushions with so proprietary an air that a stranger might have supposed the sofa fetched down for her sister’s sake rather than the reverse. Mr. Darcy took up his usual station at the mantel. A backgammon table stood open at the far end of the room, its men set out and waiting; Mr. Hurst considered it once, found no one disposed to give him a game, and resigned himself to the fire.

Miss Darcy came to Elizabeth’s elbow and asked, in the low voice of a girl half hoping to be argued out of an ambition, whether the air she had prepared might be too long for general company.

“If it is too long,” Elizabeth said, “we shall have the less time for conversation, which is a clear gain to everyone.”

Miss Darcy laughed.

Bingley carried Jane her second cup of tea before Mrs. Reynolds had thought to send it round. Mr. Darcy saw him do it, and nothing so indulgent as a smile was permitted to escape him; only some severity about the eyes gave way by a hair’s breadth, and Elizabeth, to her great irritation, understood the easing perfectly, and resented that she did. He had begun the day master of his own table. He had ended it a man whose own table had taken some part in managing him.

After the tea was carried away the company removed to the music room, where the lamps had been lit close about the instrument and left low at the further end. Mr. Bennet had a chair by the window with a volume off the nearest shelf; Mr. Hurst was three parts asleep in another. Jane had brought her embroidery to the table by the lamps and, finding the light too kind to refuse, had let it lie in her lap and was watching the pianoforte. Bingley stood near the fire at Mr. Darcy’s side with the look of a man waiting for music who could not quite be still for it.

Miss Darcy sat down, and Elizabeth, who had been asked to turn the leaves, took the chair at her shoulder.

“How prettily she plays,” Miss Bingley said to Mrs. Hurst, in a voice tuned to be overheard. “Mr. Darcy has been very right to keep her so close at it. I once heard the Italian original of this air sung in town, and I declare she has very nearly the whole of its feeling.”

Mrs. Hurst murmured that it was so.

The piece was a gentle Italian thing, not over-long. Miss Darcy’s hands had the certainty of long practice, and Elizabeth turned the leaf at the girl’s glance. She had meant to mind the music. But Bingley’s voice carried from the fire.

“Miss Bennet seems happier this evening, I think,” he said. “The music suits her.”

“Miss Bennet is less guarded in this room,” Mr. Darcy said, “than I had ever the occasion to see her in Hertfordshire.”

Bingley began some easy answer, a pleasantry about Hertfordshire and its weather, and let it die before it was finished. On her sofa Miss Bingley said nothing further.

The thing had been done very quietly, and it had gone home.

At the window her father lowered his book over one finger, considered the two gentlemen at the fire, and raised it again.

This was something other than the day’s matchmaking. He had not asked to be forgiven his share in Jane’s unhappiness; he had not so much as glanced toward it. He had only set the truth where it belonged, in his own house, where the man who most needed it might take it up.

“Miss Elizabeth, if you please.”

She came to herself, found the page still standing before her, and turned it a moment too quick.

The measure she had been taking all day of the man across the chancel shifted, with a dry click, to make room for a discovery she did not want: that he had all this while been keeping his own reckoning, quietly and at his own cost, and that it left her, on the whole matter of him, nowhere honest to stand.

Miss Darcy brought the piece to its close, and the room gave its soft applause. Mr. Hurst startled awake into the thick of it; her father, who applauded nothing, allowed himself the ghost of a nod. Mr. Darcy’s regard found his sister with a plain quiet pride that wanted no words.

“You see, Papa,” Elizabeth said, low, as the girl gathered her music, “I have turned the pages without disgrace.”

“You have done more than that, Lizzy,” he said, not looking up from his book. “You have sat the whole evening with nothing whatever to say against the house, and borne it like a Christian.” He turned his page. “I begin to fear it agrees with you.”

She had no answer ready, which was itself an answer; and she kept her hand flat upon the music desk a moment longer than the music required, unwilling, just then, to move it, for it had gone quite still of its own accord, and she looked at it as at the hand of a stranger.