The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood.
Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women's lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through.
Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it.
Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour.
And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes;-eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.
All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, or of any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world if it were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor looked for explanation in his friend's ashy face.
"They are," Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully round at the locked room, "murdering the prisoners.
If you are sure of what you say; if you really have the power you think you have-as I believe you have-make yourself known to these devils, and get taken to La Force.
It may be too late, I don't know, but let it not be a minute later!"
Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of the room, and was in the courtyard when Mr. Lorry regained the blind.