Thus fasting and with her soul comforted, Jeanne listened to the soft whisper of her Voices.[631] The two days she spent in the inn were passed in retirement, on her knees.[632] The banks of the Vienne and the broad meadows, still in their black wintry garb, the hill-slopes over which light mists floated, did not tempt her.

But when, on her way to church, climbing up a steep street, or merely grooming her horse in the inn yard, she raised her eyes to the north, there on a mountain close at hand, just about the distance that would be traversed by one of those stone cannon-balls which had been in use for the last fifty or sixty years, she saw the towers of the finest castle of the realm.

Behind its proud walls there breathed that King to whom she had journeyed, impelled by a miraculous love.
[Footnote 629: _Trial_, vol.i, p.

143.] [Footnote 630: _La vie de saint Harenc glorieux martir et comment il fut pesche en la mer et porte a Dieppe_, in _Recueil des poesies francaises des XV'e et XVI'e siecles_, by A.de Montaiglon, vol.
ii, pp.

325-332.] [Footnote 631: Still if Jeanne were the age she is said to have been, about eighteen, she was under no obligation to fast, but only to be abstinent.