forgotten to say, she would say it willingly. Asked, if it seemed to her
that she would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope, the vicar
of God, in all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience, she
replied that she desired to be taken before him, and then she would
answer all that she ought to answer.

Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second
party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly
attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have
conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained time,
probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to understand
it.

This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and
whisperer, L'Oyseleur, was working against it in the background. Jeanne
evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not understand the
distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant: that
God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could decide upon the
questions which were between her Lord and herself, was too firmly fixed
in her mind: and again and again the men whose desire was to make her
adopt this expedient, were driven back into the ever repeated questions
about St. Catherine and St. Margaret.

One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little
interval that remained, in a series of useless questions about her
standard. Was it true that this standard had been carried into the
Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind?
"It had been through the labour and the pain," she said, "there was good
reason that it should have the honour."