A day and a night on the road give everyone time to hope, and Mr. Gardiner uses all of it. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 47 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the travellers reason their way toward comfort, and Longbourn takes it away again at the front door.

Surely, argues her uncle, Wickham would never risk an elopement with no marriage in view; the temptation is not worth the ruin. Elizabeth's answer is bleak and better informed: Wickham's debts, Wickham's character, and Lydia's dowry of nothing. At home they find Jane worn with carrying the family alone, their father silent, and their mother upstairs, receiving her visitors in her dressing-room as chief sufferer of the piece.

• Mrs. Bennet's grief takes its natural forms: blame for the Forsters, terror that Mr. Bennet will fight Wickham and be ki ...