After a while the vrai prud’ homme came seldom; other figures more like herself, soft forms of women, white and shining, with golden circlets and ornaments, appeared to her in the great halo of the light; they bowed their heads, naming themselves, as to a sister spirit, Catherine, and the other Margaret.  Their voices were sweet and soft with a sound that made you weep.  They were both martyrs, encouraging and strengthening the little martyr that was to be.  “A lady is there in the heavens who loves thee”:  Virgil could not say more to rouse the flagging strength of Dante.  When these gentle figures disappeared, the little maid wept in an anguish of tenderness, longing if only they would take her with them.  It is curious that though she describes in this vague rapture the appearance of her visitors, it is always as “mes voix” that she names them—­the sight must always have been more imperfect than the message.  Their outlines and their lovely faces might shine uncertain in the excess of light; but the words were always plain.  The pity for France that was in their hearts spread itself into the silent rural atmosphere, touching every sensitive chord in the nature of little Jeanne.  It was as if her mother lay dying there before her eyes.

Curious to think how little anyone could have suspected such meetings as these, in the cottage hard by, where the weary ploughmen from the fields would come clamping in for their meal, and Dame Isabeau would call to the child, even sharply perhaps now and then, to leave that all-absorbing needlework and come in and help, as Martha called Mary fourteen hundred years before; and where the priest, mumbling his mass of a cold morning in the little church, would smile indulgent on the faithful little worshipper when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne there whoever might be absent.  She was a shy girl, blushing and drooping her head when a stranger spoke to her, red and shame-faced when they laughed at her in the village as a devote before her time; but with nothing else to blush about in all her simple record.

Neither to her parents, nor to the cure when she made her confession, does she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though they had lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon them, and could keep silence no longer.  She was but thirteen when the revelations began and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to fulfil her mission.  She had no guidance from her voices, she herself says, as to whether she should tell or not tell what had been communicated to her; and no doubt was kept back by her shyness, and by the dreamy confusion of childhood between the real and unreal.  One would have thought that a life in which these visions were of constant recurrence would have been rapt altogether out of wholesome use and wont, and all practical service.  But this does not seem for a moment to have been the case.  Jeanne was no hysterical girl, living with her head in a mist,