roughly handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court that would
pitch him form his guilty seat. It was but the fourteenth of March
still, and there were six weary weeks to come. She did not know the hour
or the day, but yet she believed that this great deliverance was on its
way.

And there was a great deliverance to come: but not of this kind. The
voices of God--how can we deny it?--are often, though in a loftier
sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise to the
ear but break it to the heart. They promised her a great victory: and
she had it, and also the fullest deliverance: but only by the stake and
the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any other girl
of her age. They did not speak to deceive her, but she was deceived;
they kept their promise, but not as she understood it. "These all died
in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar
off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them." Jeanne too was
persuaded of them, but was not to receive them--except in the other way.

On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne fasted,
whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely questioned
on the subject, this time, of Franquet d'Arras, who, as has been above
narrated, was taken by her in the course of some indiscriminate fighting
in the north. She was asked if it was not mortal sin to take a man as
prisoner of war and then give him up to be executed. There was evidently
no perception of similarities in the minds of the judges, for this was
precisely what had been done in the case of Jeanne herself; but even she
does not seem to have been struck by the fact. Their object, apparently,
was by proving that she was in a state of sin, to prove also that her
voices were of no authority, as being unable to discover so simple a
principle as this.