om and terror of her thoughts and the peaceful
"river flowing on"! How tranquil were the fields that spread beyond
her sight! But there is no rest or joy in Nature to the agitated and
foreboding spirit. Must we not have conquered the world, if we serenely
enter into Nature's rest?

Fain would Jacqueline have turned her face and steps in another
direction that night than toward the road that led to Meaux: to the
village on the border of the Vosges,--to the ancient Domremy. Once her
home was there; but Jacqueline had passed forth from the old, humble,
true defences: for herself must live and die.

Domremy had a home for her no more. The priest, on whom she had relied
when all failed her, was still there, it is true; and once she had
thought, that, while he lived, she was not fatherless, not homeless: but
his authority had ceased to be paternal, and she trusted him no longer.

She had two graves in the old village, and among the living a few faces
she never could forget. But on this earth she had no home.

Musing on these dreary facts, and on the bleeding, branded image of
Leclerc, as her imagination rendered him back to his friends, his
fearful trial over, a vision more familiar to her childhood than her
youth opened to Jacqueline.

There was one who used to wander through the woods that bordered the
mountains in whose shadow stood Domremy,--one whose works had glorified
her name in the England and the France that made a martyr of her. Jeanne
d'Arc had ventured all things for the truth's sake: was she, who also
came forth from that village, by any power commissioned?

Jacqueline laid the tracts on the grass. Over them she placed a stone.
She bowed her head. She hid her face. She saw no more the river, trees,
or home-returning birds; heard not the rush of water or of wind,--nor,
even now, the hurry and the shout; that possibly to-morrow would follow
the poor wool-comber through the streets of Meaux,--and on the third day
they would brand him!

She remembered an old cottage in the shadow of the forest-covered
mountains. She remembered one who died there suddenly, and without
remedy,--her father, unabsolved and unanointed, dying in fear and
torment, in a moment when none anticipated death. She remembered a
strong-hearted woman who seemed to die with him,--who died to all the
interests of this life, and was buried by her husband ere a twelvemonth
had passed,--her mother, who was buried by her father's side.

Burdened