The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 36. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Of the hour we spent with my father I will set down very little. He heard us through without once looking away from Anne, which I had never seen him do with any guest; he asked her two questions that had not occurred to me in a year of carrying the matter; and at the end of it he sat a while turning his spectacles in his hand, and then said, "Well," and got up, and was, from that hour, of use. "Your mother," he told me at the library door, "will be told that Miss de Bourgh is paying us a visit out of solicitude for your sister Mary. It has the advantage of being plausible, and no other virtue whatever."

The house took Anne in the way houses do, without opinions. Hill carried linen up to the spare room; Cook, informed there was a baronet's daughter at table, sent up to Meryton for fish; and Anne sat in our parlour with her hands quiet in her lap and drank her tea, and asked, in a voice that hardly shook at all, whether Longbourn kept a fire in the evenings, for she felt the cold. She looked as she had always looked. She held her cup as though someone might yet take it from her. I made no observations aloud.

My mother came back from Meryton at five o'clock with Kitty, the Colonel, and Lydia, and was in raptures before her bonnet was off. To have missed Lady Catherine de Bourgh's call was a calamity from which, she assured us all, she would not soon recover. To have gained Miss de Bourgh in exchange was a stroke of fortune she attributed, on no evidence, to her own management. The visit's cause she never thought to question. Great families were forever falling out; it was, she said, one of the burdens of rank; look at what she herself had suffered from her own daughters. Nobody corrected her arithmetic, and she went off to instruct Cook about the fish that had already been sent for.

The Colonel had stopped in the parlour doorway at the sight of his cousin. Anne looked back at him. He bowed, said he was glad to find her looking so well, and asked nothing. Lydia, to her credit or to the griffin's, was too full of Meryton's admiration to notice anything so quiet as Anne de Bourgh.

It was at dinner, watching Anne decline a second helping of soup under the full artillery of my mother's hospitality, that I noticed that my old suspicion of Mr. Collins was gone. For most of a year, it had sat in me like a stone in a shoe, never provable, never quite dischargeable. Now that I knew the truth, I could see him as the pompous, foolish clergyman he truly was, rather than the homicidal maniac I had feared.

The next morning I was at the breakfast table, reading a letter from my aunt Gardiner and getting no further than the date, when a horse came up the drive at a pace our drive was not accustomed to. There had not been time — I want that set down; I had counted the hours myself — there had not been time for any word of yesterday to reach London and bring anyone back again.

Hill got the whole name out this time, and had the pleasure of it.

"Mr. Darcy, ma'am."

I stood up before I had decided to.