Given a driver who is at once inexperienced and short-sighted, a fresh horse harnessed to a light dog-cart, a dark night and a narrow gateway, and the result may be forecast without much rashness.

Mallinson upset his wife and the cart just within the entrance to Garples.

Luckily the drive was bordered by thick shrubs of laurel, so that Clarice was only shaken and dazed.

She sat in the middle of a bush vaguely reflecting that her heart was anchored to a rock and yet her husband had spilled her out of a dog-cart.

Between the incident and her state of mind immediately preceding it, she recognised an incongruity which she merely felt to be in some way significant.