Thus Jacqueline sat alone and thought that she would read by herself the tracts Leclerc had found it good to study.  But unopened she held the little printed scroll, while she watched the home-returning birds, whose nests were in the mighty branches of the chestnut-trees.

She needed the repose more than the teaching, even; for all day the sun had fallen heavily on the harvesters,—­and toiling with a troubled heart, under a burning sun, will leave the laborer not in the best condition for such work as Jacqueline believed she had to do.

But she had promised the old woman she would read these tracts, and this was her only time, for they must be returned that night:  others were waiting for them with an eagerness and longing of which, haply, tract-dispensers see little now.  Still she delayed in opening them.  The news of Leclerc’s sentence had filled her with dismay.

Did she dread to read the truth,—­“the truth of Jesus Christ,” as his mother styled it?  The frightful image of the bleeding, lacerated wool-comber would come between her and the book in which that faith was written for maintaining which this man must suffer.  Strange contrast between the heavy gloom 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!