Laure trembled violently, and her voice was faint with pleading: “Speak no ill of him, madame! I was not stolen away. Freely, willingly, I went with him. Freely—” she drew herself up and held her head high—“freely and willingly, though with the curse of Heaven on my head, would I go with him still, were it in the same way!” “God of God! why hast thou left him, then?” A black shadow spread itself out before Laure’s eyes, and in her unpitying wilderness her woman’s soul reeled, blindly. Her voice shook and her body grew rigid, as she answered: “I—did not—leave him.” “He is dead?” Eleanore’s tone was softer. “No; he is not dead!” Laure’s face contorted terribly, as there suddenly rushed over her the memory of the last three months; and as it swept upon her, she sank to her knees, and held out her hands again in supplication: “Ah, pity me! pity me! As thou’rt a woman, pity me, and ask me not what’s gone! I loved him. God in Heaven! How did I love him! And he hath gone from me. Mine no more, he left me to wander over the face of the earth. He left me to weep and mourn through all the years of mine empty life. Flammecœur! Flammecœur! How wast thou dearer than God! more merciless than Him.” Here her words became so rapid and so incoherent that all meaning was lost, and the deserted woman, exhausted, overcome with her torn emotions, presently fell heavily forward to the floor, in a faint. In this scene Eleanore had forgotten every scruple, every resentment, everything save her own motherhood and Laure’s need. Putting aside all thought of the girl’s shame, her abandonment, her rejection, she went to her and lifted her up in her strong and tender arms, and, with the art known only to the big-souled women of her type, poured comfort upon the bruised and broken body of the wanderer, and words of cheer and encouragement into her more cruelly bruised and broken mind. In a few moments Laure had recovered consciousness, had grown calm, and was weeping quietly in her mother’s arms. Then madame began to make her fit for the Castle again. She took off the soiled and ragged garments, that hung upon the skin and bone of her wasted body. She bathed the poor flesh with hot water, and with her own tears. She combed and coiled the wonderful, tangled hair. And lastly, wrapping her, for warmth, in a huge woollen mantle, she led Laure over to her bed, drew back the heavy curtains, and laid the weary woman-child in it, to rest.