Soon after leaving the town, a side road cut into the main one; a waggon was lumbering down it at no great pace, but just before the branch road joined the main one the driver cracked his whip loudly, so that his team of young horses started forward suddenly.  Too suddenly for the comprehension of some children who were playing in the road; for a second or more they looked at the approaching waggon, then, when the necessity dawned upon them, they ran for safety, one one way, one another, and the third, a baby boy, like a chicken, half across the way to the right, then, after a scurry in the middle, back again to the left, under the horses’ feet.

Julia shouted to him, but in the excitement of the moment she spoke English, and not Dutch, though it hardly mattered, for the little boy was far too frightened to understand anything.  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.

“My good women,” she said shortly to the peasants who, with upraised hands and many gestures, stared at her, “there is nothing the matter, there is no reason why you should stand there and look at me; I assure you no one has been hurt, and no one is going to be; you had much better go on your way, as I shall do.  Good-afternoon.”