Scream!

The paragraphs in this past week's Clarissa reading that most desperately made me want to write an over-the-top epistolary novel myself:

I have been frighted out of my wits--still am in a manner out of breath--thus occasioned--I went down under the usual pretence in hopes to find something from you. Concerned at my disappointment I was returning from the woodhouse, when I heard a rustling, as of somebody behind a stack of wood. I was extremely surprised: but still more, to behold a man coming from behind the furthermost stack. Oh thought I, at that moment, the sin of a prohibited correspondence!

In the same point of time that I saw him, he besought me not to be frighted: and still nearer approaching me, threw open a horseman's coat: and who should it be but Mr Lovelace! I could not scream out (yet attempted to scream, the moment I saw a man; and again when I saw who it was) for I had no voice: and had I not caught hold of a prop, which supported the old roof, I should have sunk.

I had hitherto, as you know, kept him at a distance: and now, as I recovered myself, judge of my first emotions when I recollected his character from every mouth of my family; his enterprising temper; and found myself alone with him in a place so near a by-lane and so remote from the house. (Letter 36)