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 rage about like a mad bull."
"Still, it was our fault," she said. "We ought to have stopped. His clothes are torn. How much ought we to pay?"
"Nothing at all," said Sherlock. "Don't you let yourself be blackmailed."
She didn't answer or look in his direction, thus emphasising the fact that she had asked her question of me, not of him.