On the morrow, they made for Abbeville; a series of recent and well-publicised robberies by highwaymen caused Mr. Darcy to leave the ladies inside the chaise whilst he rode on the box with the coachman—both men, the under-coachman driving the servants’ coach, and all of the out-riders—with their pistols cocked and ready. Fortunately, the precaution was unnecessary, as they experienced no inconvenience of any kind on their journey through to Abbeville, excepting the now-familiar ennui arising from the arrow-straight roads and barren countryside.

“There is a part of me—the part we all try and sometimes fail to repress—Mr. Darcy,” declared Elizabeth, as they cleared the troubled section of the route and reached the post-house, “that would rather enjoy being set-upon by highwaymen, just as in a novel. You, my brave husband, would heroically defend your terrified dependents and boldly challenge the perpetrators. Facing certain death in the process, you would somehow contrive to escape from their grasp, and disappear in a clatter of hooves and a whirlwind of dust; I rather fancy the idea that one of the miscreants would fall desperately in love with Georgiana, and would return our valuables in an apoplexy of remorse, keeping ‘only the emerald ring she wore as a token of the love glimpsed but never possessed’.” Georgiana interrupted this transporting vision to request that Elizabeth refrain from marrying her off to a felon, and Darcy stopt the recitation entirely by suggesting that his wife suspend the progress of the Gothic novel she was conjuring for their doubtful benefit, and write a much-overdue letter to her father and Kitty. The substitute letter was neither as interesting nor as compelling, but had the virtue of removing her husband and sister from the perils of Elizabeth’s imagination.