While the soldiers within the walls were thus trembling and drawing back, the bishop and his clergy took the matter in hand; they sallied forth, a long procession attended by half the city, to parley with the King. It was in the earliest dawn, while yet the peaceful world was scarcely awake; but the town had been in commotion all night, every visionary person in it seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and a panic of superstition and spiritual terror taking the strength out of every arm. Jeanne was already at her post, a glimmering white figure in the faint and visionary twilight of the morning, when the gates of the city swung back before this tremulous procession. The King, however, received the envoys graciously, and readily promised to guarantee all the rights of Troyes, and to permit the garrison to depart in peace, if the town was given up to him. We are not told whether the Maid acquiesced in this arrangement, though it at once secured the fulfilment of her prophecy; but in any case she would seem to have been suspicious of the good faith of the departing garrison. Instead of retiring to her tent she took her place at the gate, watchful, to see the enemy march forth. And her suspicion was not without reason. The allied troops, English and Burgundian, poured forth from the city gates, crestfallen, unwilling to look the way of the white witch, who might for aught they knew lay them under some dreadful spell, even in the moment of passing. But in the midst of them came a darker band, the French prisoners whom they had previously taken, who were as a sort of funded capital in their hands, each man worth so much money as a ransom, It was for this that Jeanne had prepared herself. "_En nom Dieu_," she cried, "they shall not be carried away." The march was stopped, the alarm given, the King unwillingly aroused once more from his slumbers. Charles must have been disturbed at the most untimely hour by the ambassadors from the town, and it mattered little to his supreme indolence and indifference what might happen to his unfortunate lieges; but he was forced to bestir himself, and even to give something from his impoverished exchequer for the ransom of the prisoners, which must have been more disagreeable still. The feelings of these men who would have been dragged away in captivity under the eyes of their victorious countrymen, but for the vigilance of the Maid, may easily be imagined.