man, grey-faced but tearless,
fought as the men fought, using her Jean's cross-bow from the narrow
upper windows. All that rage, desperation, and hate could do was done,
and when the door fell in with a crash Jean the younger had been
avenged four times over. John Stone took as little by his wantonness
as he deserved.

Then came the end. There was a rush up the stone stairway, a brief
struggle to gain the upper level, a minute's surging back and forth, a
briefer, fiercer fury of strife among the cranks and meal-bags, a few
rough oaths, a woman's scream, and then silence, or what by contrast
passed for silence, since the sudden quiet was only broken by deep
breathing and the sucking of air into dry throats. England had gained
an ignoble victory.

Fire followed as naturally as the spark follows the jar of flint and
steel, and with a hundred and fifty years to dry its beams, its
cobwebbed walls hung with mouldy dust from the grinding of as many
harvests, its complex wooden troughs and grain-shoots parched to
tinder, the old mill was a ready prey. All that could burn burnt like
a pile of dry shavings. But the walls, the stairway, and the upper
floor were of stone, and stood; and but for one thing the peace which
followed the coming of the Maid might have set the waterwheel creaking
afresh. That one thing, typical of the times, forbade the thought.
When the men of Amboise cleared away the rubbish they found the bones
of Jean Calvet the sixth piled in a grim derision upon his own
millstones, and so these stones never turned again. Who could eat
bread of their making?

But the blackened shell was one of the Dauphin's favourite haunts, nor
could a better stage for one of those plays of make-believe which had
called down the old King's bitter irony have been well devised. So far
as possible the mill had been restored to its old condition. The
rubbish had been cleared from the ancient watercourse; the tough old
wheel, freed from the weeds and soil which bound it, was set running as
in the past, and a palisade of stout pickets erected to fence out the
curious. The side furthest from the roadway, with its clumps of
hazels, alder thicket, and chestnut wood in the distance was left open.
Here, amid surroundings which lent a sombre realism to the pretence,
Charlemagne could carve out a kingdom, Roland sound the horn of
Roncesvalles, or the Maid herself win back to France the crown the
boy's forefather had lost.

But,