The morning was fine, which Darcy had decided over his coffee was a thing he meant, this once, to leave alone. The resolution survived breakfast. It did not survive the morning room.

Miss Bingley had established herself near the open doors, her shawl arranged in that careful negligence which costs more pains than plainness, the injured ankle propped where every passing person must be conscious of it. Mrs. Hurst sat within reach of every want her sister had not yet expressed. Miss Bennet had the seat by the light with her work, and Bingley had gone to her before Darcy could determine whether the move wanted helping, hindering, or letting be.

That was the difficulty: he no longer knew which.

“I have been laboring,” Bingley said to Miss Bennet, “to recover the second of Mr. Markham’s three points from yesterday. The first and third escape me entirely.”

She set a stitch. “Only the second? You are economical in your losses.”

“I thought it safer not to mislay all three at one stroke.”

The answer carried more feeling than wit, and Miss Bennet heard the feeling. She drew her thread through and let the smile follow it, and for the length of that operation the room contained no one but the two of them. It was the thing Darcy had failed to manufacture all of Easter and had watched arrive yesterday of its own accord, over a sermon Bingley confessed himself unequal to repeating.

Then Miss Bingley’s footstool gave a scrape against the chair leg, loud enough to turn every face toward it. Her hand had been nowhere near it; her injured foot, Darcy was meant to suppose, had shifted of its own accord. He did not trouble to suppose it; and across the room Elizabeth’s nose wrinkled the smallest degree, which told him she had not troubled either.

“How tiresome,” Miss Bingley said, recovering into graceful surprise. “Charles, the screen is not quite right. If you could⁠—“

“Louisa is nearer,” Bingley said, with more force than the occasion required, and seemed to hear the words only after the room had.

“I only meant,” Miss Bingley said, with the injured patience, “that Louisa has not the reach.”

The honest exchange was over; Bingley sat with the unhappy air of a man recalled from the only conversation he wanted. Darcy might have left it there. Instead, with the promptness of long habit, he converted the moment into a principle: the grounds were full of subjects, and a man could not be interrupted on a terrace by his own furniture.

“It is too fine a morning,” Darcy said, “to be spent indoors.”

The room received the remark as rooms receive observations that have misplaced their beginnings, Bingley with frank confusion.

“I mean,” he said, with such dignity as remained to a man explaining himself after the fact, “that the south walk has the light, if any of the party wish to take the air.”

Miss Bingley declared herself equal to the sofa and unequal to the terrace, and refused her brother’s arm with a bright fortitude Darcy was obliged to admire aloud and not to believe. Mrs. Hurst would remain with her. Mr. Bennet closed the book he had not opened and undertook to walk as far as the second bench, on the understanding that nothing beyond it need please him. Elizabeth said she would be glad of the air, and looked at Darcy as she said it with an expression he had no leisure to study.

Bingley, in the doorway, looked back twice toward the sofa, and walked out with the air of a man who has left a duty behind him.

The south terrace was dry, the gravel had its color up, and the ground turned, by the design of dead men cleverer than he was that morning, to deliver the prospect at the right remove. Bingley fell in beside Miss Bennet unbidden; Darcy, who had not bidden him, declined the credit and took it anyway.

“I believe,” Bingley said, “I owe you Mr. Markham’s second point.”

“Only if you trust me to keep it.”

“He held that repentance must do something before it asks to be believed.”

Miss Bennet turned the handle of her parasol. “And do you think that possible?”

The question was gently put. Its meaning was not gentle, and Bingley checked at it. And in the instant he checked, the gravel behind him gave under the whole following company, which arrived at his back at once, an audience assembled where a moment before there had been only a path. Bingley turned his head enough to betray that he had heard it come.

Miss Bennet’s hand left the parasol and folded into her shawl.

Whatever Bingley had been about to answer did not survive the arrival. His mouth opened and found only, “The path is very pretty.”

“It is,” Miss Bennet said.

Darcy saw what he had done, too late to undo it. He had taken a thing that worked because no one was watching it and asked it to perform; and Bingley was laboring, as kindly as his nature permitted, to give his friend the result his friend so plainly wanted. The only sound course was to do nothing further. He knew it the way a man knows the wise thing the instant before he declines to do it.

“The lower turn is easier underfoot,” he heard himself say, where the way broadened. “Miss Bennet, if you should wish to rest before Mr. Bennet’s bench, we might take it at a slower pace.”

Bingley brightened as though he had been handed a fortune. Miss Bennet did not.

“You are very good,” she said, “but I would not divide the party on my account.”

The gentleness of it convicted him more than refusal would have. Bingley said, too quickly, that no one need go anywhere in particular; and across the halted company Elizabeth’s eyes found Darcy’s and held them, and told him without a word that she had reached his diagnosis some minutes before he had, and felt no obligation to spare him the knowledge.

Mr. Bennet surveyed the assembly. “A walk of this nature affords everyone the satisfaction of movement and no one the inconvenience of getting anywhere. I find it admirably suited to the present company.”

They went on, because to stop would have given the failure more weight than it could bear. Bingley produced one further remark upon the prospect; Miss Bennet returned it with exact civility; and after that the gravel supplied most of their conversation. At the second bench Mr. Bennet sat and admired nothing beyond it.

By the time the terrace came again into view Darcy had stopped composing remedies. The case was past private management; and which quarter the correction must come from was the least comfortable certainty in his house.

Indoors, the claims of the morning scattered the party. Mrs. Hurst, oppressed by an idle hour, proposed the portfolio of drawings in the long gallery, and Georgiana went with her out of politeness. The windows gave the best north light in the house, and the gallery’s length afforded a private word to anyone willing to be seen having it. Elizabeth went that way after them. Whether for the light, or the drawings, or because the others had gone there, Darcy did not pretend to know. He knew only that he followed, having decided upon it long before he reached the door.

Georgiana and Mrs. Hurst were a good way down the gallery, bent over the cabinet, audible and unattending. He stopped two windows short of them, where a clean band of light lay across the boards and the cabinet stayed in view; down the wall the line of his fathers looked on with the family habit of expecting to be obeyed. Propriety had been provided for.

“I owe you an apology for the morning,” he said.

Elizabeth rested a hand on the back of a carved chair. “I had not understood the weather to have given offense, sir.”

“It was not the weather. I made my purpose too plain to be borne.”

“My sister,” she said, “has had a great deal of purpose exercised on her behalf already — and a winter of it to recover from.”

He had expected the cut and did not flinch. Far down the gallery a portfolio cover fell softly shut, and Georgiana’s voice answered Mrs. Hurst’s, uncertain and clear.

“I have wronged your sister once,” Darcy said, “by reading her feeling for my friend’s sake when I was bound to read it for hers. I do not propose to do it twice by undoing that wrong as clumsily as I did the wrong. I am asking for your judgment in the matter. Not for your leave to act on mine.”

She said nothing for a space. Her hand moved once against the wood and went still, and he let his attention drop to the bright boards at his feet, because to watch her receive it was more than he could do and go on.

“You ask a great deal,” she said. “One gentleman has already settled my sister’s future without troubling to consult it. I am not eager to assist a second. Still less to lend my hand to making an old presumption wear the face of present care.” She paused. “And what of Mr. Bingley? Are you to ask him as well? Or is my judgment to serve for that part of the business where confession would be the more inconvenient?”

It was the thing he had been saying to himself for four months, said to his face in under a minute. He kept his eyes on the floor a moment longer than the answer required. There was nothing to be gained by defending the position. The position was the offense.

“He shall have no answer from me,” Darcy said. “On that I can satisfy you without difficulty, for I have already determined it. What I ask of you is the harder thing, and I will not dress it as the easier. I am asking you to tell me when I am arranging without knowing that I am — as I did this morning, and did not see until you had seen it for me.”

“You wish to be watched.”

“I wish to be corrected. I have proved this week that I cannot be trusted to catch myself.”

She turned toward the window. Below, the terrace lay pale in the noon light, and the path on which he had blundered looked harmless enough to have deceived a wiser man.

“If I were to agree,” she said, “you would understand it as the prevention of a scheme. Not the advancement of one.”

“I would be grateful for even so narrow a thing.”

“Then hear the terms, for I will not be asked them twice.” She did not look at him. “There is to be no forcing. No contrivance so visible that Jane must defend herself against it. You are not to decide what my sister feels from her being quiet, nor what Mr. Bingley feels from his being otherwise. You may make room. You may not fill the room with your conclusions.”

He inclined his head, and would have said he understood; but she had not finished, and he knew the clause still coming for the one that would cost him. To make room a man might do with his hands; to leave it made, and not improve upon it, was a discipline he lacked.

“And if, when room is made,” she said, “they do not come together — you are to let that be the end of it, and not improve upon it.”

“I understand.”

“You agree very quickly, sir. It does not flatter the gravity of what you asked.”

“I have had a good deal of practice this spring,” Darcy said, “in seeing the justice of your reproaches sooner than I should like.”

“I was not reproaching you, in the morning room. When I looked at you.”

“What were you doing?”

“Protecting my sister,” Elizabeth said. “You will find, in time, that it is most of what I do.”

He found nothing graceful to set against that, and did not try. When she spoke again her voice had lost an edge, not toward softness but toward business.

“This afternoon, if the day holds, my father means to walk. Jane is easiest when she does not perceive herself arranged. If Miss Darcy is kept in by the morning’s exertion, there will be the less to manage all round.”

“A walk,” he said. “Not a procession.”

She glanced at him. “Just so. And if Mr. Bingley places himself where he wishes —“

“I am to discover whether I possess the accomplishment of letting him stay.”

“You begin to learn the dialect,” Elizabeth said. “I will assist you, Mr. Darcy, so far as keeping you from being useful. Beyond that you must shift for yourself.”

It was not pardon. It admitted him on terms, and under watch, which was more than he had come into the gallery believing he had a right to ask. They turned back before the distance could be remarked. At the cabinet Georgiana’s face came up, lit with the relief of a girl who has carried a conversation past her strength; and Elizabeth went straight to her and into the drawings, so that Darcy was left a step behind, ordering nothing, and finding that the surrender of the government of a matter could feel disconcertingly like ease.

“You have not shown Miss Elizabeth my mother’s portrait,” Georgiana ventured, taking courage from being needed. “It is at the far end.”

They went to it, Darcy following at the distance proper to a brother and a host, near enough to hear and too far to be of any use.

Elizabeth considered Lady Anne some while. “She has the look of a woman accustomed to being obeyed.”

“She generally was,” Darcy said.

“A family likeness, perhaps.”

“Not, I hope, in every particular.”

“No,” Elizabeth said, studying the canvas. “You are taller.”

Georgiana’s laugh escaped before she could prevent it, and she looked so stricken at her own boldness that Elizabeth smiled at her rather than at him, which Darcy minded not at all.

“Then I must hope,” he said, “the resemblance is not past correcting.”

“That,” Elizabeth said, “remains to be seen.”

It was not forgiveness, and scarcely kindness; and yet the gallery had altered around the three of them, his sister standing nearer to Elizabeth than she had dared all morning. Darcy looked at the portrait of the woman who had indeed expected to be obeyed and understood that yielding the command of the thing had not lessened his danger by a particle. It had only set Elizabeth Bennet more securely inside it.

The day held. After luncheon the party went out again, and this time Darcy did almost nothing, which his whole nature informed him was insufficient and which Elizabeth’s presence, two steps off, informed him was exactly required. Mr. Bennet had stayed within with the library, Georgiana with the pianoforte; so the company was four, and fell into a pair and a pair, Bingley and Miss Bennet ahead, Darcy and Elizabeth after.

The forward pair were talking. Not performing it; talking. Darcy could not hear the words and did not need them; he read the unguarded turn of Bingley’s shoulder, the way Miss Bennet’s head tipped toward what was being said and not away from it. Yesterday’s ease, reproduced without accident.

He felt the old impulse rise toward the obvious instrument, and had the words half assembled before he caught them. The river path turned down to the left and gave the better view of the water; but sent them down a steep way and Bingley must offer his arm, and Jane must take it or refuse it, and either way she would know how the arm came to be offered. He shut his mouth on it and went on.

Something in his silence reached Elizabeth, for she turned her head. “You felt it that time,” she said.

“I did. The view of the water seemed a pity to miss. I did not, until the words were nearly out, perceive what I was building under it.”

“You took the correction before I had to give it. That is new.” She let a few steps pass. “I had a sharper way of saying it by me, in case.”

“You may keep it. I have no doubt of the occasion arising.”

“No,” she agreed. “Nor have I.”

They walked on. The forward pair turned, of their own accord, onto the level path beside the water and not down to it, and went along it still talking; and behind them the silence grew, by degrees, from the silence of two people with nothing to say into the silence of two people aware of being silent together.

Where the lawn dropped to the water a heron stood at the margin, gray and unhurried, and lifted as they came near, not in alarm but with the deliberate condescension of a thing that has decided to be elsewhere. Bingley pointed; Miss Bennet watched it go. And behind them Darcy and Elizabeth had both stopped to watch the same thing and looked at the place in the air where it had been, and then at the empty water, and did not speak. She moved on first. He went with her, keeping her pace because it was hers and not because he had measured it.

He had asked for an ally, and he had one, on her terms and under her eye; and within the hour the alliance had done the very thing he had asked of it, the work none of his. He had not, until this moment on the path with the water shining and the heron gone and Elizabeth Bennet beside him, troubled to calculate what the having of it would cost him.