Page 227 of What Change Entails

“I came to you.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “You did.”

Then Mr. Bennet cleared his throat with theatrical patience, and Darcy stepped inside.

Epilogue

Mr. Bennet kept Mr. Darcy in the library for twenty-seven minutes.

Elizabeth knew because Lydia counted.

She had taken up a position in the hall under the pretense of searching for a ribbon she had lost three days earlier. Kitty stood beside her, offering no pretense whatsoever. Mrs. Bennet fluttered between the parlor and the stairs with smelling salts in one hand and a lace handkerchief in the other, while Mary sat at the pianoforte and played something improving with too much force.

“Twenty-eight minutes,” Lydia whispered.

“You said twenty-seven.”

“It became twenty-eight while I was speaking.”

Elizabeth stood near the parlor window and tried not to listen to her sisters squabbling. This was impossible. Longbourn had never been a household for secrecy. The parlor door might as well have been a curtain for all the privacy it granted.

“That cannot be good,” Kitty whispered.

“Time in Papa’s library is a privilege we have never been offered. That Mr. Darcy is so favored speaks well of him,” Lydia said.

Elizabeth closed her eyes.

At last, the door opened.

Mr. Bennet emerged first, looking more entertained than any father ought to look after receiving a gentleman’s request for his daughter’s hand.

“Well, Lizzy,” he said, “you may congratulate me. I have survived Mr. Darcy’s seriousness and found it less fatal than expected.”

“Papa.”

“He has asked permission to marry you. I told him he might, provided you did not object, and provided he understands that he is acquiring all of us in various degrees of inconvenience.”

Mrs. Bennet gave a cry and dropped into the nearest chair.

Lydia seized Kitty by both arms.

Mary stopped playing on a wrong note.

Mr. Darcy stepped from the library, his dignity intact but his ears a little red.

Elizabeth loved him violently for both.

Mr. Bennet looked between them, then waved one hand toward the garden door. “Go. Speak to one another before your mother recovers enough to direct the wedding breakfast.”

Mr. Darcy offered Elizabeth his arm.

She took it.

They went into the shrubbery, not far from the house, because propriety still existed even when happiness wished to trample it beneath both feet. The afternoon air smelled of grass and late roses. Elizabeth walked beside him until they reached the little turn in the path where the lilacs had grown thick enough to obscure the windows.

Only then did they stop.

Mr. Darcy turned to her.