It made a great many smile; and no wonder, when you consider what a gentle and innocent little thing she looked.  One could hardly believe she had ever even seen men slaughtered, she look so little fitted for such things.

“In the final assault at Orleans did you tell your soldiers that the arrows shot by the enemy and the stones discharged from their catapults would not strike any one but you?”

“No.  And the proof its, that more than a hundred of my men were struck.  I told them to have no doubts and no fears; that they would raise the siege.  I was wounded in the neck by an arrow in the assault upon the bastille that commanded the bridge, but St. Catherine comforted me and I was cured in fifteen days without having to quit the saddle and leave my work.”

“Did you know that you were going to be wounded?”

“Yes; and I had told it to the King beforehand.  I had it from my Voices.”

“When you took Jargeau, why did you not put its commandant to ransom?”

“I offered him leave to go out unhurt from the place, with all his garrison; and if he would not I would take it by storm.”

“And you did, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“Had your Voices counseled you to take it by storm?”

“As to that, I do not remember.”

Thus closed a weary long sitting, without result.  Every device that could be contrived to trap Joan into wrong thinking, wrong doing, or disloyalty to the Church, or sinfulness as a little child at home or later, had been tried, and none of them had succeeded.  She had come unscathed through the ordeal.

Was the court discouraged?  No.  Naturally it was very much surprised, very much astonished, to find its work baffling and difficult instead of simple and easy, but it had powerful allies in the shape of hunger, cold, fatigue, persecution, deception, and treachery; and opposed to this array nothing but a defenseless and ignorant girl who must some time or other surrender to bodily and mental exhaustion or get caught in one of the thousand traps set for her.

And had the court made no progress during these seemingly resultless sittings?  Yes.  It had been feeling its way, groping here, groping there, and had found one or two vague trails which might freshen by and by and lead to something.  The male attire, for instance, and the visions and Voices.  Of course no one doubted that she had seen supernatural beings and been spoken to and advised by them.  And of course no one doubted that by supernatural help miracles had been done by Joan, such as choosing out the King in a crowd when she had never seen him before, and her discovery of the sword buried under the altar.  It would have been foolish to doubt these things, for we all know that the air is full of devils and angels that are visible to traffickers in magic on the one hand and to the stainlessly holy on the other; but what many and perhaps most did doubt was, that Joan’s visions, Voices, and miracles came from God.  It was hoped that in time they could be proven to have been of satanic origin.  Therefore, as you see, the court’s persistent fashion of coming back to that subject every little while and spooking around it and prying into it was not to pass the time—­it had a strictly business end in view.