abstracted from the world.  She had all the enthusiasms even of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding her with the intimacy of the village, paying her visits, staying all night, sharing her room and her bed.  She was ready to be sent for by any poor woman that needed help or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle; one would love to know if perhaps in the Tresor at Rheims there was some stole or maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands.  But the Tresor at Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be told, and the bottles and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that pauvre sire, are more thought of than relics of an earlier age.

At length, however, one does not know how, the secret of her double life came out.  No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon her—­meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified tears over and wonder at—­ripened her intelligence so that she came at last to perceive that it was practicable, a thing to be done, a charge to be obeyed.  She had this before her, as a girl in ordinary circumstances has the new developments of life to think of, and how to be a wife and mother.  And the news brought by every passer-by would prove doubly interesting, doubly important to Jeanne, in her daily growing comprehension of what she was called upon to do.  As she felt the current more and more catching her feet, sweeping her on, overcoming all resistance in her own mind, she must have been more and more anxious to know what was going on in the distracted world, more and more touched by that great pity which had awakened her soul.  And all these reports were of a nature to increase that pity till it became overwhelming.  The tales she would hear of the English must have been tales of cruelty and horror; not so many years ago what tales did not we hear of German ferocity in the French villages, perhaps not true at all, yet making their impression always; and it was more probable in that age that every such story should be true.  Then the compassion which no one can help feeling for a young man deprived of his rights, his inheritance taken from him, his very life in danger, threatened by the stranger and usurper, was deepened in every particular by the fact that it was the King, the very impersonation of France, appointed by God as the head of the country, who was in danger.  Everything that Jeanne heard would help to swell the stream.

Thus she must have come step by step—­this extraordinary, impossible suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul—­to perceive a kind of miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how everything pointed towards such a deliverance.  It would have seemed natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which promised a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to deliver France, might have affected her mind, did we not have it from