kill him, and they cannot make him dumb.
He will hold the truth the faster for all they do to him. Jesus Christ
on his side, do you think he will fear the city, or all Paris, or all
France? He does not know what it is to be afraid. And when God opened
his eyes to the truth of his gospel, which the priests had hid, he meant
that John should work for it,--for he is a working-man, whatever he sets
about."

So this old woman tried, and not without success, to comfort herself,
and sustain her tender, proud, maternal heart. The dire extremity into
which she and her son had fallen did not crush her; few were the tears
that fell from her eyes as she recalled for Jacqueline the years of her
son's boyhood,--told her of his courage, as in various ways it had made
itself manifest: how he had always been fearless in danger,--a
conqueror of pain,--seemingly regardless of comfort,--fond of
contemplation,--contented with his humble state,--kindly, affectionate,
generous, but easily stirred to wrath by injustice, when manifested by
the strong toward the weak,--or by cruelty, or by falsehood.

Many an anecdote of his career might she relate; for his character,
under the pressure of this trial, which was as searching and severe a
test of her faith as of his, seemed to illustrate itself in manifold
heroic ways, all now of the highest significance. With more majesty and
grandeur his character arose before her; for now in all the past, as she
surveyed it, she beheld a living power, a capability, and a necessity of
new and grand significance, and her heart reverenced the spirit she had
nursed into being.

Removed to the distance of a prison from her sight, separated from
her love by bolts and bars, and the wrath of tyranny and close-banded
bigotry, he became a power, a hero, who moved her, as she recalled
his sentence, and prophesied the morrow, to a feeling tears could not
explain.

They passed the night together, the young woman and the old. In the
morning Jacqueline must go into the field again. She was in haste to go.
Leaving a kiss on the old woman's cheek, she was about to steal away in
silence; but as she laid her hand upon the latch, a thought arrested
her, and she did not open the door, but went back and sat beside the
window, and watched the mother of Leclerc through the sleep that must be
brief. It was not in her heart to go away and leave those eyes to waken
upon solitude. She must see a helpful hand and hopeful face, and, if