.

As we backed into that sea of scowling faces I thought of the various
revolutions France has seen. It was like stirring up a wasps' nest.
Everyone was yelling at once. In the front rank stood the man who had
been knocked down, his trousers cut to tatters. He had lashed himself
into such a fury that he had become almost incoherent, and the flood of
speech which rushed from his white lips was more like the yells of an
animal than the ordered utterance of a human being. By his side were the
two women who had been in the cart, both sobbing and screaming, while
everyone else in the angry mob shouted simultaneously. Aunt Mary went
very pale; Payne looked upon his handiwork with a sulky grin; but Miss
Randolph took the business in hand with the greatest pluck. She had
whisked off her veil and faced the people boldly, her grey eyes meeting
theirs, her face white, save for a bright pink spot on either cheek. At
sight of her beauty the clamour died down, and in the lull she spoke to
the man who had been thrown under the horse.

"I am very sorry you are hurt," she said, "and shall be pleased to give
you something to buy yourself new clothes. Are you injured anywhere?"

At the sound of her correct but foreign-sounding French someone in the
crowd shouted out, "_A bas les Anglais!_" The girl drew herself up
proudly and looked in the direction of the voice. She didn't try to
excuse herself by denying England and claiming a nationality more
popular in France, and I loved her more than ever for this reticence.

"Pay!" shouted the man who had been hurt, with one hand wiping a trickle
of blood out of his eye, with the other thumping the mud-guard of the
car. "Of course you shall pay. God only knows what injuries I have
received. _Mazette!_ I am all one ache. Ah, you pay well, or you do not
go on!" He pressed closer to the car, and his friends closed in around
him.

"Pay them, Molly! pay anything they ask!" quavered Aunt Mary, "or they
will kill us! Oh, I always knew something like this was bound to happen!
What a fool I was to leave my peaceful home and come to a country of
thieves and murderers!"

"Don't be frightened, Aunt Mary," said the girl, with more patience for
her relative's garrulous complaints than I had. Then she turned to me.
"Brown, is that man much hurt?" she asked briskly.

"No," I replied. "He is merely scratched, and no doubt bruised. If he
had any bones broken, any internal injury or severe strain, he couldn't