“It’s all right!” said Rupert, recovering his balance by a hair-breadth, and feeling in his heart that it was all wrong, “the Craffroe Hill will stop her.  Hold on to the rail.”

Fanny said nothing.  It was, indeed, all that she could do to keep her seat in the trap, with which the rushing road was playing cup and ball; she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in emergencies.  When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare, is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse than useless.  Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.

It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight.  At its foot another road forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the grass, and the cushions slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself that they were in for a bad business.

For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare’s grasping stride.  The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and Fanny Fitz was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning’s lap.  Long briars and twigs struck them from either side, the trap bumped in craggy ruts and slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.

Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, Fanny found herself on her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot, having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.

Fanny was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt, but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her tightened its clasp in silence.  When a man is strongly moved by tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known; he need not—­it is known beyond all telling by the one other person whom it concerns.  She felt suddenly that she was safe, that his heart was torn for her sake, and that the tension of the last ten minutes had been great.  It went through her with a pang, and her head swayed against his arm.  In a moment she felt his lips on her hair, on her temple, and the oldest, the most familiar of all words of endearment was spoken at her ear.  She recovered herself, but in a new world.  She tried to walk on up the lane, but stumbled in the deep ruts and found the supporting arm again ready at need.  She did not resist it.