It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby's touch would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell into each other's arms with a vehemence that completely overset them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the hissing of escaping steam, conveyed the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make history for the world. Though not a satirist--she does not hate well enough to be that--Ada Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing character. Richard Delavel's first wife was 'a gentle and complaisant being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense, square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.' When opposed in will or contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was 'the evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it difficult to get on with.' A pattern of order and conscientiousness, 'governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume, and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,' she might have made an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel, as he to her. Still, she was very proud of the look of 'blood' in her Richard, and when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in Sydney society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a farmer was quite forgotten. 'Annie might have been a Delavel from the beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to her of the real character of her bringing up.... Years and certain circumstances will often affect a woman's memory that way--a man somehow manages to keep a better grasp of facts.'