Lenore found herself terribly restless; and the foreboding in her mind seemed not all the effect of the storm. Her thoughts moved through terrifying shadows. It seemed to her that some great, unknown evil hung over her; but her apprehension was as elusive as it was unreasonable. For some hours she forced herself to keep in bed, tossing and twisting about, but letting no sound escape her. It seemed at last as if the fury of the wind had diminished, though the lightning-flashes continued incessantly, and the whole sky was still alive with muttering thunder. A little after midnight, urged by a restlessness that she was powerless to control, Lenore rose, threw a loose bliault around her, took down the iron lantern that hung, dimly burning, on a hook in a corner of the room, and, lighting her way with this, went out into the silent upper hall of the Castle. Gray and ghostly enough everything looked, in the dim, flickering lantern-light. There was in the air a smell of pitchy smoke from burnt-out torches, and it seemed to Lenore as if spirits were passing through this mist. Yet she felt no fear of anything in the spirit world. Her heart was full of something else,—a vague, indefinable, more terrible dread, an oppression that she could not reason away. Clad in her voluminous purple mantle, with her hair unbound and flowing over her shoulders, where it sparkled faintly in the lantern-light, she went down the stairs, across the shadowy, pillared spaces of the great lower hall, and so into the long room where Gerault had sat on the day when the herald had come to call him to Rennes. She had a vision of him sitting there at the table, bent upon his manuscript philosophy, never looking up, as again and again she passed the door. It was a ghostly hour for her to be abroad and occupied in such a way; yet she had no thought of present danger. A useless sob choked her as she turned away from this place of sorrowful memories and went to the chapel. Here half a dozen candles on the altar were still burning to the god of the storm; and Lenore, finding comfort in the sight of the cross, knelt before it and offered up a prayer for peace of mind. Then, rising, she moved back again into the hall; and, dreading to return to her lonely room, where the roar of waves and the soughing of the wind round the towers made a din too great for sleep, she sat down on a bench that stood beside a pillar directly opposite the great, locked door. Sitting here, her lantern at her feet, elbow on knee, chin on hand, she fell into a strange reverie. The bitterest of all memories came back to her without bitterness; and she tried to picture to herself that woman of Gerault’s secret heart. What had she been? How had she died? Or was she dead? In what relation had she really stood to Gerault? Was she that cousin of Laval—or some other? These thoughts, which, always before, Lenore had refused to work into definite shape, came to her now and were not repelled.