engagement at Lagny. I kept it because it was a good war-sword--good
to lay on stout thumps and blows with."

She said that quite simply; and the contrast between her delicate
little self and the grim soldier words which she dropped with such easy
familiarity from her lips made many spectators smile.

"What is become of the other sword? Where is it now?"

"Is that in the proces verbal?"

Beaupere did not answer.

"Which do you love best, your banner or your sword?"

Her eye lighted gladly at the mention of her banner, and she cried out:

"I love my banner best--oh, forty times more than the sword! Sometimes
I carried it myself when I charged the enemy, to avoid killing any one."
Then she added, naively, and with again that curious contrast between
her girlish little personality and her subject, "I have never killed
anyone."

It made a great many smile; and no wonder, when you consider what a
gentle and innocent little thing she looked. One could hardly believe
she had ever even seen men slaughtered, she look so little fitted for
such things.

"In the final assault at Orleans did you tell your soldiers that the
arrows shot by the enemy and the stones discharged from their catapults
would not strike any one but you?"

"No. And the proof is, that more than a hundred of my men were struck.
I told them to have no doubts and no fears; that they would raise the
siege. I was wounded in the neck by an arrow in the assault upon the
bastille that commanded the bridge, but St. Catherine comforted me and I
was cured in fifteen days without having to quit the saddle and leave my
work."

"Did you know that you were going to be wounded?"

"Yes; and I had told it to the King beforehand. I had it from my
Voices."

"When you took Jargeau, why did you not put its commandant to ransom?"

"I offered him leave to go out unhurt from the place, with all his
garrison; and if he would not I would take it by storm."

"And you did, I believe."

"Yes."

"Had your Voices counseled you to take it by storm?"

"As to that, I do not remember."

Thus closed a weary long sitting, without result. Every device that
could be contrived to trap Joan into wrong thinking, wrong doing, or
disloyalty to the Church, or sinfulness as a little child at home or
later, had been tried, and none of them had succeeded. She had come
unscathed through the ordeal.

Was the court discouraged? No. Naturally it was very much surprised,
very much astoni