When Laure felt this soft comfort; when she realized where, indeed, she was and who was bending over her; when she knew what land of love and of tenderness she had finally reached after her months of anguished wandering,—it seemed that she could bear no more of mingled joy and pain. She let her tears flow as freely as they would. She clung to her mother’s hand, smoothing it, kissing it, pressing it to her cheek; and finally, lulled by the sound of her mother’s voice crooning an old familiar lullaby, her mind slipped gradually out of reality, and she went to sleep. Long and long and long she slept, with the sleep of one that is leaving an old life behind, and entering slowly into the new. And for many hours her mother watched her, in the gathering darkness, till after Alixe had come softly in, and lit a torch near by the bed. And later the mother, unwilling to leave her child for a single moment, laid herself down, dressed as she was, and, drawing Laure’s passive form close to her, finally closed her eyes, and, worn out with emotion and with joy, lost herself in the mists of sleep. [Illustration] _CHAPTER TWELVE_ LAURE [Illustration] Through the long, chilly night, mother and daughter slept together, each with peace in her heart. At dawn, however, madame slipped quietly out of Laure’s unconscious embrace, and rose and prepared herself for the day. And presently she left the room, while Laure still slept. It was some time afterwards before there crept upon the blank of the girl’s mind a dim, fluttering shadow telling her that light had come again over the world. How long it was before this first sense became a double consciousness, no one knows. Laure’s stupor had been so heavy, she had been so utterly dead in her weariness, that it required a powerful subconscious effort to throw off the bonds of sleep. But when the two heavy eyes at last fell open, she gasped, and sat suddenly up in her bed. “Holy Mother! it is an angel!” The face that she looked on smiled sunnily. “No. I am Lenore.” And she would have come round to the side of the bed, but that Laure held up a hand to stay her. “Prithee, prithee, do not move, thou spirit of Lenore! Am I, then, come into thy land? Is’t heaven—for me?” For an instant, at the easily explainable illusion about that other, the new Lenore’s head drooped, and she sighed. How full of the dead maiden was every member of this Twilight Castle! But again, shaking off the momentary melancholy, she lifted her eyes, and answered Laure’s fixed look. So these two young women, whose histories had been so utterly different, and yet in their way so pitiably alike, learned, in this one long glance, to know each other. Into Laure’s deeply burning eyes, Lenore gazed till she was as one under a hypnotic spell. Her senses were all but swimming before the other turned her look, and then she asked dreamily: “Thou art Lenore. Tell me, who is Lenore?”