It certainly would have
fared badly with him had she not followed up her cry by darting into
the road, seizing him by the shoulder, and flinging him with
considerable force against the green wayside bank. She was only just
in time; as it was, the foremost horse struck her shoulder and sent
her rolling into the dust.
For an instant she lay there, perilously near the big grinding wheels;
an almost imperceptible space, yet somehow long enough for her to
decide quite calmly that it was impossible to scramble to her feet in
time, so she had better draw her legs up and trust to the wheels
missing her. Then suddenly the wheels stopped, and some one who had
seized the horses' heads addressed the waggoner with the English idiom
that is perhaps most widely known.
Julia heard "damned fool" in quite unemotional English, and almost
simultaneously the guttural shrieks of two peasant women who
approached. She picked herself up, then moving two paces to the side,
stopped to put her hat straight with a calmness she did not quite
feel. There was a volley of exclamations from the peasant women, and
"Are you hurt?" the man who had stopped the horses asked her, speaking
now in Dutch, though with an English accent.
"No," she answered, winking back the water which had come into her
eyes with the force of the blow, and she turned her back on him so
that he should not see her do it.
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