Scot, the battle is won and Orleans is delivered."

But she had turned her back on us pettishly, and was talking in a low
voice to her jackanapes. As for me, if my face had been pale before, it
now grew red enough for shame that I had angered her, who was so fair,
though how I had sinned I knew not. But often I have seen that women,
and these the best, will be all afire at a light word, wherein the
touchiest man-at-arms who ever fought on the turn of a straw could pick
no honourable quarrel.

"How have I been so unhappy as to offend mademoiselle?" I asked, in a
whisper, of her father, giving her a high title, in very confusion.

"Oh, she will hear no bourde nor jest on this Pucelle that all the
countryside is clashing of, and that is bewitching my maid, methinks,
even from afar. My maid Elliot (so I call her from my mother's kin, but
her true name is Marion, and the French dub her Heliote) hath set all her
heart and her hope on one that is a young lass like herself, and she is
full of old soothsayings about a virgin that is to come out of an oak-
wood and deliver France--no less! For me, I misdoubt that Merlin, the
Welsh prophet on whom they set store, and the rest of the soothsayers,
are all in one tale with old Thomas Rhymer, of Ercildoune, whose
prophecies our own folk crack about by the ingle on winter nights at
home. But be it as it may, this wench of Lorraine has, these
three-quarters of a year, been about the Sieur Robert de Baudricourt, now
commanding for the King at Vaucouleurs, away in the east, praying him to
send her to the Court. She has visions, and hears voices--so she says;
and she gives Baudricourt no peace till he carries her to the King. The
story goes that, on the ill day of the Battle of the Herrings, she, being
at Vaucouleurs--a hundred leagues away and more,--saw that fight plainly,