_Charles turns a leaf. A distant clock strikes the half-hour softly. Charles shuts the book with a clap; throws it aside; snatches up the rattle; and whirls it energetically, making a deafening clatter. Ladvenu enters, 25 years older, strange and stark in bearing, and still carrying the cross from Rouen. Charles evidently does not expect him; for he springs out of bed on the farther side from the door._ CHARLES. Who are you? Where is my gentleman of the bedchamber? What do you want? LADVENU [_solemnly_] I bring you glad tidings of great joy. Rejoice, O king; for the taint is removed from your blood, and the stain from your crown. Justice, long delayed, is at last triumphant. CHARLES. What are you talking about? Who are you? LADVENU. I am Brother Martin. CHARLES. And who, saving your reverence, may Brother Martin be? LADVENU. I held this cross when The Maid perished in the fire. Twentyfive years have passed since then: nearly ten thousand days. And on every one of those days I have prayed God to justify His daughter on earth as she is justified in heaven. CHARLES [_reassured, sitting down on the foot of the bed_] Oh, I remember now. I have heard of you. You have a bee in your bonnet about The Maid. Have you been at the inquiry? LADVENU. I have given my testimony. CHARLES. Is it over? LADVENU. It is over. CHARLES. Satisfactorily? LADVENU. The ways of God are very strange. CHARLES. How so? LADVENU. At the trial which sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a sorceress, the truth was told; the law was upheld; mercy was shewn beyond all custom; no wrong was done but the final and dreadful wrong of the lying sentence and the pitiless fire. At this inquiry from which I have just come, there was shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny of the dead who did their duty according to their lights, cowardly evasion of the issue, testimony made of idle tales that could not impose on a ploughboy. Yet out of this insult to justice, this defamation of the Church, this orgy of lying and foolishness, the truth is set in the noonday sun on the hilltop; the white robe of innocence is cleansed from the smirch of the burning faggots; the holy life is sanctified; the true heart that lived through the flame is consecrated; a great lie is silenced for ever; and a great wrong is set right before all men. CHARLES. My friend: provided they can no longer say that I was crowned by a witch and a heretic, I shall not fuss about how the trick has been done. Joan would not have fussed about it if it came all right in the end: she was not that sort: I knew her. Is her rehabilitation complete? I made it pretty clear that there was to be no nonsense about it. LADVENU. It is solemnly declared that her judges were full of corruption, cozenage, fraud and malice. Four falsehoods. CHARLES. Never mind the falsehoods: her judges are dead. LADVENU. The sentence on her is broken, annulled, annihilated, set aside as non-existent, without value or effect.