open, when men had
tried their torments. At least, they had witnessed, when they followed
the crowd, that his face, in contrast with theirs who tormented, shone,
as it had been the face of an angel. They had witnessed his testimony
given in the heroic endurance of physical pain. There was more to be
learned than the crowd were fit to hear or _could_ hear. Broken strains
of the Lord's song they heard him singing through the torture. Now they
had come longing for the full burden of that divinest melody.

Jacqueline entered the room quietly, scarcely observed. She sat down by
the door, and it chanced to be near the mother of Leclerc, near Victor
Le Roy.

To their conversation she listened as one who listens for his life,--to
the reading of the Scripture,--to the singing of the psalm,--that grand
old version,--

"Out of the depths I cry to thee,
Lord God! Oh, hear my prayer!
Incline a gracious ear to me,
And bid me not despair.
If thou rememberest each misdeed,
If each should have its rightful meed,
Lord, who shall stand before thee?

"Lord, through thy love alone we gain
The pardon of our sin:
The strictest life is but in vain,
Our works can nothing win,
That man should boast himself of aught,
But own in fear thy grace hath wrought
What in him seemeth righteous.

"Wherefore my hope is in the Lord,
My works I count but dust;
I build not there, but on his word,
And in his goodness trust.
Up to his care myself I yield;
He is my tower, my rook, my shield,
And for his help I tarry."

To the praying of the broken voice of John Leclerc she listened. In his
prayer she joined. To the eloquence of Mazurier, whose utterances she
laid up in her heart,--to the fervor of Le Roy, which left her eyes not
dry, her soul not calm, but strong in its commotion, grasping fast the
eternal truths which he, too, would proclaim, she listened.

She was not only now among them, she was of them,--of them forevermore.
Though she should never again look on those faces, nor listen to those
voices, of them, of all they represented, was she forevermore. Their God
was hers,--their faith was hers; their danger would she share,--their
work would aid.

Their talk was of the Truth, and of the future of the Truth. Well they
understood that the spirit roused among the people would not be quieted
again,--that what of ferocity in the nature of the bigot and the
powerful had been appeased had but for the m