In sharp contrast was the evident excitement among the passengers.

A few rose from their seats in their eagerness; as the stage pulled up in the road beside the buggy four or five of the younger men leaped to the ground.
"Are you hurt, miss ?" they gasped sympathetically.
Susy did not immediately reply, but ominously knitted her pretty eyebrows as if repressing a spasm of pain.

Then she said, "Not at all," coldly, with the suggestion of stoically concealing some lasting or perhaps fatal injury, and took the arm of Mary Rogers, who had, in the mean time, established a touching yet graceful limp.
Declining the proffered assistance of the passengers, they helped each other into the coach, and freezingly requesting the driver to stop at Mr.Peyton's gate, maintained a statuesque and impressive silence.

At the gates they got down, followed by the sympathetic glances of the others.
To all appearance their escapade, albeit fraught with dangerous possibilities, had happily ended.

But in the economy of human affairs, as in nature, forces are not suddenly let loose without more or less sympathetic disturbance which is apt to linger after the impelling cause is harmlessly spent.