for any acts of hers, neither advising them nor urging them, but being
wholly clear and free of all responsibility for them. Then, closing, she
begged in humble and touching words that all here present would pray
for her and would pardon her, both her enemies and such as might look
friendly upon her and feel pity for her in their hearts.

There was hardly one heart there that was not touched--even the English,
even the judges showed it, and there was many a lip that trembled
and many an eye that was blurred with tears; yes, even the English
Cardinal's--that man with a political heart of stone but a human heart
of flesh.

The secular judge who should have delivered judgment and pronounced
sentence was himself so disturbed that he forgot his duty, and Joan went
to her death unsentenced--thus completing with an illegality what had
begun illegally and had so continued to the end. He only said--to the
guards:

"Take her"; and to the executioner, "Do your duty."

Joan asked for a cross. None was able to furnish one. But an English
soldier broke a stick in two and crossed the pieces and tied them
together, and this cross he gave her, moved to it by the good heart that
was in him; and she kissed it and put it in her bosom. Then Isambard de
la Pierre went to the church near by and brought her a consecrated one;
and this one also she kissed, and pressed it to her bosom with rapture,
and then kissed it again and again, covering it with tears and pouring
out her gratitude to God and the saints.

And so, weeping, and with her cross to her lips, she climbed up the
cruel steps to the face of the stake, with the friar Isambard at her
side. Then she was helped up to the top of the pile of wood that was
built around the lower third of the stake and stood upon it with her
back against the stake, and the world gazing up at her breathless. The
executioner ascended to her side and wound chains around her slender
body, and so fastened her to the stake. Then he descended to finish his
dreadful office; and there she remained alone--she that had had so many
friends in the days when she was free, and had been so loved and so
dear.

All these things I saw, albeit dimly and blurred with tears; but I could
bear no more. I continued in my place, but what I shall deliver to you
now I got by others' eyes and others' mouths. Tragic sounds there were
that pierced my ears and wounded my heart as I sat there, but it is as
I tell you: the latest ima