the floor and her lips moving but uttering
nothing. Then came these words, but hardly audible: "And in a thousand
years the English power in France will not rise up from that blow."

It made my flesh creep. It was uncanny. She was in a trance again--I
could see it--just as she was that day in the pastures of Domremy when
she prophesied about us boys in the war and afterward did not know that
she had done it. She was not conscious now; but Catherine did not know
that, and so she said, in a happy voice:

"Oh, I believe it, I believe it, and I am so glad! Then you will come
back and bide with us all your life long, and we will love you so, and
honor you!"

A scarcely perceptible spasm flitted across Joan's face, and the dreamy
voice muttered:

"Before two years are sped I shall die a cruel death!"

I sprang forward with a warning hand up. That is why Catherine did not
scream. She was going to do that--I saw it plainly. Then I whispered her
to slip out of the place, and say nothing of what had happened. I said
Joan was asleep--asleep and dreaming. Catherine whispered back, and
said:

"Oh, I am so grateful that it is only a dream! It sounded like
prophecy." And she was gone.

Like prophecy! I knew it was prophecy; and I sat down crying, as knowing
we should lose her. Soon she started, shivering slightly, and came to
herself, and looked around and saw me crying there, and jumped out of
her chair and ran to me all in a whirl of sympathy and compassion, and
put her hand on my head, and said:

"My poor boy! What is it? Look up and tell me."

I had to tell her a lie; I grieved to do it, but there was no other way.
I picked up an old letter from my table, written by Heaven knows who,
about some matter Heaven knows what, and told her I had just gotten it
from Pere Fronte, and that in it it said the children's Fairy Tree had
been chopped down by some miscreant or other, and-- I got no further.
She snatched the letter from my hand and searched it up and down and
all over, turning it this way and that, and sobbing great sobs, and the
tears flowing down her cheeks, and ejaculating all the time, "Oh, cruel,
cruel! how could any be so heartless? Ah, poor Arbre Fee de Bourlemont
gone--and we children loved it so! Show me the place where it says it!"

And I, still lying, showed her the pretended fatal words on the
pretended fatal page, and she gazed at them through her tears, and said
she could see herself that they were hatefu