Elizabeth is alone with a letter to Jane when the doorbell rings, and the wrong cousin walks in. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 32 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a small, strange chapter of half-started conversations in which Mr. Darcy keeps arriving where Elizabeth is and failing to explain why.

Caught without the buffer of company, Darcy makes civil inquiries and then sits down to a silence that Elizabeth has to keep breaking. Their talk wanders from Netherfield, and whether Bingley will ever return to it, to Charlotte’s marriage and the economics of settling near one’s family, where Darcy edges close to some meaning of his own and then retreats from it.

• Darcy’s observation that fifty miles of good road is an easy distance leaves Elizabeth arguing for Kent’s remoteness and wondering what, exactly, he is driving at.
• His remark that she cannot have been always at Longbourn surprises them both, and the conversation dies of it; he takes up a newspaper and retreats.
• Charlotte, hearing of the visit, offers the only theory that fits: he must be in love with Elizabeth, though his blank composure makes the case hard to argue for long.
• The cousins begin calling at the parsonage almost daily, and while Fitzwilliam’s motive is plainly the pleasure of the company, what brings Mr. Darcy remains anybody’s guess.