"Pouf, child! How could he, when I did not call? There! a truce to the talk while I brew the posset. I hope that Catherine is not coming down with sickness." She hurried into the kitchen, while Jeanne, wondering greatly at what had taken place, took her little sister into the garden, and sat down under another tree. CHAPTER VI JEANNE'S HARSH WORDS "_The miracle of this girl's life is best honored by the simple truth._" SAINTE-BEUVE. So, half from shyness, half from fear of ridicule, the child told no one of her strange experience, but often did the thought of the happening come to her, and she wondered what it could mean. Indeed so much did she dwell upon it that Mengette rallied her upon her abstraction. "What has come over you, Jeanne?" asked the latter one day when she and Jeanne in company with other girls and women were at the river engaged in one of the periodical washings of the village. "Twice have I spoken to you, yet you have not answered. Has your mother been scolding you?" "Mother scolding? Why, no!" Jeanne glanced up in surprise. "There is naught the matter, Mengette. I was just thinking." "Of what?" questioned her friend, but as Jeanne made no reply she lowered her voice and said with some asperity: "You are thinking too much, Jeanne D'Arc. You are not a bit like yourself, and every one is noticing it. Why, when you come to a washing you come to laugh, to sing, to talk, and to have a good time; but you do naught but mope." And Mengette gave the garments she was washing a vicious thump with the clothes-beater. "Well, I haven't moped so much but that my clothes are as clean as the ones you are washing," retorted Jeanne, holding up some linens for inspection, and regarding her friend with a quizzical glance. "Mengette, those poor garments will be beaten to a thread if you pound them much harder." Mengette let her paddle drop, and pushed back her hair with her wet hands. "I'd willingly beat them to a thread to hear you laugh, Jeanne. Now come up closer, and I will tell you something that Hauviette told me last night. I don't want any one else to hear it."