r! it breaks my heart. I will be so good to her when I get
home. I will do her work for her, and be her comfort, and she shall not
suffer any more through me."

There was some more talk of this sort, then Uncle Laxart said:

"You have done the will of God, dear, and are quits; it is true, and
none may deny it; but what of the King? You are his best soldier; what
if he command you to stay?"

That was a crusher--and sudden! It took Joan a moment or two to recover
from the shock of it; then she said, quite simply and resignedly:

"The King is my Lord; I am his servant." She was silent and thoughtful
a little while, then she brightened up and said, cheerily, "But let us
drive such thoughts away--this is no time for them. Tell me about home."

So the two old gossips talked and talked; talked about everything and
everybody in the village; and it was good to hear. Joan out of her
kindness tried to get us into the conversation, but that failed, of
course. She was the Commander-in-Chief, we were nobodies; her name was
the mightiest in France, we were invisible atoms; she was the comrade
of princes and heroes, we of the humble and obscure; she held rank above
all Personages and all Puissances whatsoever in the whole earth, by
right of baring her commission direct from God. To put it in one word,
she was JOAN OF ARC--and when that is said, all is said. To us she was
divine. Between her and us lay the bridgeless abyss which that word
implies. We could not be familiar with her. No, you can see yourselves
that that would have been impossible.

And yet she was so human, too, and so good and kind and dear and loving
and cheery and charming and unspoiled and unaffected! Those are all the
words I think of now, but they are not enough; no, they are too few and
colorless and meager to tell it all, or tell the half. Those simple old
men didn't realize her; they couldn't; they had never known any people
but human beings, and so they had no other standard to measure her by.
To them, after their first little shyness had worn off, she was just a
girl--that was all. It was amazing. It made one shiver, sometimes, to
see how calm and easy and comfortable they were in her presence, and
hear them talk to her exactly as they would have talked to any other
girl in France.

Why, that simple old Laxart sat up there and droned out the most tedious
and empty tale one ever heard, and neither he nor Papa D'Arc ever gave
a thought to the badness of th