I did not hear this, but Dunois did, and spoke of it.  The challenge was refused.

Sunday morning her Voices or some instinct gave her a warning, and she sent Dunois to Blois to take command of the army and hurry it to Orleans.  It was a wise move, for he found Regnault de Chartres and some more of the King’s pet rascals there trying their best to disperse the army, and crippling all the efforts of Joan’s generals to head it for Orleans.  They were a fine lot, those miscreants.  They turned their attention to Dunois now, but he had balked Joan once, with unpleasant results to himself, and was not minded to meddle in that way again.  He soon had the army moving.

Chapter 15 My Exquisite Poem Goes to Smash

We of the personal staff were in fairyland now, during the few days that we waited for the return of the army.  We went into society.  To our two knights this was not a novelty, but to us young villagers it was a new and wonderful life.  Any position of any sort near the person of the Maid of Vaucouleurs conferred high distinction upon the holder and caused his society to be courted; and so the D’Arc brothers, and Noel, and the Paladin, humble peasants at home, were gentlemen here, personages of weight and influence.  It was fine to see how soon their country diffidences and awkwardnesses melted away under this pleasant sun of deference and disappeared, and how lightly and easily they took to their new atmosphere.  The Paladin was as happy as it was possible for any one in this earth to be.  His tongue went all the time, and daily he got new delight out of hearing himself talk.  He began to enlarge his ancestry and spread it out all around, and ennoble it right and left, and it was not long until it consisted almost entirely of dukes.  He worked up his old battles and tricked them out with fresh splendors; also with new terrors, for he added artillery now.  We had seen cannon for the first time at Blois—­a few pieces—­here there was plenty of it, and now and then we had the impressive spectacle of a huge English bastille hidden from sight in a mountain of smoke from its own guns, with lances of red flame darting through it; and this grand picture, along with the quaking thunders pounding away in the heart of it, inflamed the Paladin’s imagination and enabled him to dress out those ambuscade-skirmishes of ours with a sublimity which made it impossible for any to recognize them at all except people who had not been there.

You may suspect that there was a special inspiration for these great efforts of the Paladin’s, and there was.  It was the daughter of the house, Catherine Boucher, who was eighteen, and gentle and lovely in her ways, and very beautiful.  I think she might have been as beautiful as Joan herself, if she had had Joan’s eyes.  But that could never be.  There was never but that one pair, there will never be another.  Joan’s eyes