Days pass, the post brings nothing, and then it brings Mr. Collins. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 48 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which the search in London stalls, the neighborhood enjoys the scandal, and the family receives the most breathtakingly unhelpful condolence letter ever written.

Mr. Collins writes to sympathize, and no enemy could have done it better: the death of a daughter, he observes, would have been a blessing in comparison with this; the false step of one injures the fortunes of all the others; and who, connected with such a family, will now marry the rest? He closes by congratulating himself on a certain event of last November, without which he must have shared the disgrace.

• Mr. Gardiner takes over the London search and works it properly: inquiries at hotels, applications to Colonel Forster for the names of Wickham’s friends, anything that might yield a direction.
• The returns come in anyway: Wickham left gaming debts in Brighton exceeding a thousand pounds, and Meryton’s late angel is discovered to owe money at every shop in town.
• Mr. Collins’s letter advises the Bennets to throw off their unworthy child for ever and leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offence, counsel he attributes, with Lady Catherine’s endorsement, to Christian forgiveness.
• Mr. Bennet comes home defeated, and meets his own share of the blame without flinching: let him feel, for once in his life, how much he has been to blame; the impression, he notes, will pass away soon enough.