“He will stay at home, but not grow old,” murmured Joan.

The talk rattled on in the gay and careless fashion privileged to youth, and we got the Paladin to map out his campaigns and fight his battles and win his victories and extinguish the English and put our King upon his throne and set his crown upon his head.  Then we asked him what he was going to answer when the King should require him to name his reward.  The Paladin had it all arranged in his head, and brought it out promptly: 

“He shall give me a dukedom, name me premier peer, and make me Hereditary Lord High Constable of France.”

“And marry you to a princess—­you’re not going to leave that out, are you?”

The Paladin colored a trifle, and said, brusquely: 

“He may keep his princesses—­I can marry more to my taste.”

Meaning Joan, though nobody suspected it at that time.  If any had, the Paladin would have been finely ridiculed for his vanity.  There was no fit mate in that village for Joan of Arc.  Every one would have said that.

In turn, each person present was required to say what reward he would demand of the King if he could change places with the Paladin and do the wonders the Paladin was going to do.  The answers were given in fun, and each of us tried to outdo his predecessors in the extravagance of the reward he would claim; but when it came to Joan’s turn, and they rallied her out of her dreams and asked her to testify, they had to explain to her what the question was, for her thought had been absent, and she had heard none of this latter part of our talk.  She supposed they wanted a serious answer, and she gave it.  She sat considering some moments, then she said: 

“If the Dauphin, out of his grace and nobleness, should say to me, ’Now that I am rich and am come to my own again, choose and have,’ I should kneel and ask him to give command that our village should nevermore be taxed.”

It was so simple and out of her heart that it touched us and we did not laugh, but fell to thinking.  We did not laugh; but there came a day when we remembered that speech with a mournful pride, and were glad that we had not laughed, perceiving then how honest her words had been, and seeing how faithfully she made them good when the time came, asking just that boon of the King and refusing to take even any least thing for herself.

Chapter 6 Joan and Archangel Michael

All through her childhood and up to the middle of her fourteenth year, Joan had been the most light-hearted creature and the merriest in the village, with a hop-skip-and-jump gait and a happy and catching laugh; and this disposition, supplemented by her warm and sympathetic nature and frank and winning ways, had made her everybody’s pet.  She had been a hot patriot all this time, and sometimes the war news had sobered her spirits and wrung her heart and made her acquainted with tears, but always when these interruptions had run their course her spirits rose and she was her old self again.