hat is enough, Noel Rainguesson; stop where you are, before you
get yourself into trouble. And don't bother me any more for some days or
a week an it please you, for I cannot abide your clack."

"Come, I like that! I didn't want to talk. I tried to get out of
talking. If you didn't want to hear my clack, what did you keep
intruding your conversation on me for?"

"I? I never dreamed of such a thing."

"Well, you did it, anyway. And I have a right to feel hurt, and I do
feel hurt, to have you treat me so. It seems to me that when a person
goads, and crowds, and in a manner forces another person to talk, it is
neither very fair nor very good-mannered to call what he says clack."

"Oh, snuffle--do! and break your heart, you poor thing. Somebody fetch
this sick doll a sugar-rag. Look you, Sir Jean de Metz, do you feel
absolutely certain about that thing?"

"What thing?"

"Why, that Jean and Pierre are going to take precedence of all the lay
noblesse hereabouts except the Duke d'Alencon?"

"I think there is not a doubt of it."

The Standard-Bearer was deep in thoughts and dreams a few moments, then
the silk-and-velvet expanse of his vast breast rose and fell with a
sigh, and he said:

"Dear, dear, what a lift it is! It just shows what luck can do. Well, I
don't care. I shouldn't care to be a painted accident--I shouldn't value
it. I am prouder to have climbed up to where I am just by sheer natural
merit than I would be to ride the very sun in the zenith and have to
reflect that I was nothing but a poor little accident, and got shot up
there out of somebody else's catapult. To me, merit is everything--in
fact, the only thing. All else is dross."

Just then the bugles blew the assembly, and that cut our talk short.

Chapter 25 At Last--Forward!

THE DAYS began to waste away--and nothing decided, nothing done. The army
was full of zeal, but it was also hungry. It got no pay, the treasury
was getting empty, it was becoming impossible to feed it; under pressure
of privation it began to fall apart and disperse--which pleased the
trifling court exceedingly. Joan's distress was pitiful to see. She was
obliged to stand helpless while her victorious army dissolved away until
hardly the skeleton of it was left.

At last one day she went to the Castle of Loches, where the King was
idling. She found him consulting with three of his councilors, Robert le
Maton, a former Chancellor of France, Christophe d'Harcourt, an