A closer intimacy¹ will occasionally be created by some accident, some fortuitous circumstance, than weeks of ordinary intercourse² will produce. Walk down Bond Street in a hailstorm of peculiar³ severity and you may make a friend of the first person you meet, whereas you would be held to have committed an affront⁴ were you to speak to the same person in the same place on a fine day. You shall travel smoothly⁵ to York with a lady and she will look as though she would call the guard at once were you so much as to suggest that it were a fine day; but if you are lucky enough to break a wheel before you get to Darlington, she will have told you all her history and shared your sherry by the time you have reached that town. Arabella was very much shocked by the dreadful accident she had seen. Her nerves had suffered, though it may be doubted whether her heart had been affected⁶ much. But she was quite conscious when she reached her room that the poor Major's misfortune, happening as it had done just beneath her horse's feet, had been a godsend to her. For a moment the young lord's arm had been round her waist and her head had been upon his shoulder. And again when she had slipped from her saddle she had felt his embrace. His fervour to her had been simply the uncontrolled expression of his feeling at the moment,—as one man squeezes another tightly by the hand in any crisis of sudden impulse. She knew this;—but she knew also that he would probably revert⁷ to the intimacy which the sudden emotion had created. The mutual⁸ galvanic shock might be continued at the next meeting,—and so on. They had seen the tragedy together and it would not fail to be a bond of union. As she told the tragedy to her mother, she delicately laid aside her hat and whip and riding dress, and then asked whether it was not possible that they might prolong their stay at Rufford. "But the

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