The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 25. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Pemberley, the 2nd of August

I came down into Derbyshire for the partridges and have not given a partridge a thought since I got out of the carriage.

Darcy met me on the step. "There is a thing you had better have from me before you go in," he said, "and not from Caroline. The Bennet sisters are in the country."

I believe I said, "Which Bennet sisters," like a fool, there being only the one set in England that interested me, or that Darcy was likely to mention.

"Miss Bennet and Miss Elizabeth, and Mrs. Collins, who was Miss Mary Bennet when you met her last. They come with an aunt and uncle from town, and are lodged at Lambton. They dine here tonight." He watched me take it. "If it is not to your liking, I will make your excuses, and you need not come down at all."

"It is entirely to my liking," I said, which was the truth and not the half of it, and I went up to dress with my hands not quite steady on the buttons.

I have spent many months assuring myself I had given her up. It appears I have done no such thing. I have only mislaid her, the way a man mislays a thing he cannot bear to have lost, by refusing ever to look in the place he had it last.

She came in on her uncle's arm, and I had one bad moment when I feared I had built her up in the dark into something the daylight would spoil. Then she looked up and saw me, and a colour came into her face that no woman gets up on purpose though her life should hang on it, and I knew two things in that half-second and have not been able to un-know them since. The first is that Darcy was wrong about her in the autumn, wrong to the bone, wrong as I have never in twelve years known him wrong about a plain fact. The second is that I let him be wrong for me, and paid a winter for it.

"Mr. Bingley." She gave me her hand. "You are come for the shooting."

"I am told there is shooting," I said. "I confess I forgot to ask." Which fetched the ghost of a smile out of her, the first I had earned of her in eight months, and I would have walked back to Hertfordshire to earn the next one. At dinner, we said nothing across the table that would bear repeating. One does not, with a sister on either hand and the fish going round.

Here is the thing I came upstairs to set down before it stops astonishing me. Darcy spent the whole of this evening making himself agreeable to a merchant from Cheapside.

Mr. Gardiner is an easy, sensible, well-made man who keeps a warehouse in view of his own front door and has never pretended to be otherwise; and Darcy talked to him of fishing as though he were an old family friend.

"Come up on Thursday and I'll put you on the big fish," he told him. "They lie further up than a stranger would try. I'll send a man down with tackle."

"I warn you, sir, I shall hold you to it," said Gardiner.

"I count on it," said Darcy, and meant the whole of it, and I sat there with my glass and wondered what had been done to my friend. He was capable of generosity to those at any kind of a disadvantage, including to me, when I had been a stupid young cawker. But somehow, I would not have thought calm, practical Mr. Gardiner to be the sort who inspired such a reaction from him.

Caroline enlightened me, though she would go to her grave before she owned she had. She has been in a temper all evening, and the whole of it aimed at Miss Elizabeth Bennet, whom she cannot pardon for standing in the same county as Darcy. Somewhere over the sweets she must remind the table that Miss Eliza and the Darcys had been quite thrown together in the spring, in Kent, at Rosings, when Darcy went down to his aunt's. "Such a reunion for you all," she said.

Kent. In the spring. I sat there and did the one sum I have ever done quickly in my life. Darcy went into Kent after Easter and came out of it grey to the bone and would not tell me why; and kept a window in Grosvenor Street the whole of April like a man watching a road; and once began to say to me, when I was in Kent—, and shut his mouth on the rest of it. And Miss Elizabeth Bennet was in Kent that spring.

I have not the least notion what passed between the two of them there. The nature of their falling-out, for clearly there had been one, was not my affair. I know only that his grimness since Kent, and the quick bright look he could not keep off her tonight, were the two ends of one rope; and that whatever they broke between them in the spring they have been quietly mending all this evening, and neither of them able to say so aloud.

He is in love with her. I would stake my fortune on it.

Darcy's sister is still a child at heart: a great tall girl of sixteen frightened out of her wits by her own dinner table. She looked ready to go through the floor when Caroline, still hunting Miss Elizabeth, brought up some officer the Meryton people had known — a Wickham. Miss Darcy set down her glass and looked miserable, perhaps remembering the feud between her brother and this Wickham. Miss Elizabeth turned the talk so smoothly you would never have marked her doing it.

I have formed a resolution, which for me is very nearly an event. I let a cleverer man reason me out of the best thing that ever came near me, once, on evidence, and the evidence was rotten. I will not hand him the chance a second time, though I think, from his face tonight, he is the last man in England who would take it now. Tomorrow I mean to call at Lambton, and the day after, and every day they will have me, and say to Miss Bennet in daylight and in plain English the thing I should have written her in the winter and had not the heart to.

The partridges will keep. They have kept this long.