s head Jeanne knelt before him,
and wept as she embraced his knees. "O gentle king," she said, "now is
fulfilled the will of God, who was pleased that I should raise the siege
of Orleans and should bring you to your city of Rheims to be crowned and
anointed, in proof that you are true king and rightful possessor of the
realm of France." She herself felt that her mission was accomplished,
and besought the king to allow her to return to her home, "to my father
and mother, to keep their sheep for them, as was my wont." But Jeanne
was too useful to be allowed to retire, and though she no longer heard
the call of her divine monitors Charles insisted on her remaining to
help him to win back his kingdom; but "all that was to be done she had
now accomplished; what remained was--to suffer."

As she rode through the streets of Rheims she exclaimed: "O why can I
not die here!" "And where, then, will you die?" asked the archbishop. "I
know not; it will be where God pleases. I have done what my Lord
commanded me to do. Now I would that it might please Him to send me back
to keep my sheep with my sister and my mother." Her courage was as high
as ever, the brave heart faltered not, but it was no longer inspired.
"She began to hear those voices, no longer from heaven, but from the
hearth, those voices that vainly call disheartened man, sick of ambition
and glory, to the home of his earliest affections, to the humble
occupations of his childhood, to the obscurity of his early days."
Hearken to those voices, Jeanne, and strive no longer to awaken faint
echoes of thy heavenly voices:

"The oracles are dumb,...
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."

This portion of Jeanne's life has always seemed to me the most pitiful,
the period when "her God had forsaken her," when her heart warned her
that her divine task was done, and when yet that heart yearned to do
more for France. In the hour of supreme trial strength came to her with
the thought that her suffering was the will of God; but now what was the
will of God? In vain she prayed for guidance; there was nothing but the
timidity and the yearning for rest of this girlish heart on the one
hand, and the pleading of the king and the courtiers on the other. It
was not to be expected that Jeanne, always willing to sacrifice herself,
should do anything else than consent still to be, as she had been for
thre