In neither face nor manner did Laure betray any suggestion of her feeling; and she found herself presently seated at a wheel, between Alixe, who was at the tapestry frame, and Lenore, who had come to the room for the first time in many weeks, and was engaged in fashioning a delicate little garment of white _saie_. Madame, at the head of the room, was embroidering a square of linen and overseeing the work of every one else; and she glanced, every now and then, rather searchingly into her daughter’s face, finding in it, however, nothing that could cause her anxiety; for Laure was ashamed of her own sensations, and strove bravely to conceal them. Possibly this scene might have held out promise of reward to the thinker, the psychologist, or the humanitarian. Of all these quiet, busy women, was there one whose dull, passionless exterior did not cover an intricate and tumultuous heart-history? The rebellious thought-life of Alixe was no less interesting, despite her inactivity, than the deadening sorrow through which Lenore had passed. Nor had the early life of Eleanore, with its doubtful joys and its bitter periods of loneliness, left any stronger traces in her face than had the long after-years of rigid self-suppression. She had nearly overcome her once devastating habit of self-analysis, by forcing herself to take an unselfish interest in those around her. But the marks of her later and nobler struggles with grief lay as plainly in her face as those of her younger life. Only, the influence of her youth, with its rebellions and its solitudes, was to be found bodily transferred into the character of Laure, who had, in her infancy, absorbed her mother into herself. These four women, by reason either of years or station, had experienced much in the ways of joy and sorrow. But to what depths of unhappiness all the other pathetically colorless lives of the uninstructed and unloved women of that day had sunk, cannot be surmised by any one who has seen what strange courses loneliness and solitude will take. Who knows how great a self-struggle may result only in a pallid, vacant face and a negative personality? And what had they, all these neglected women of the chivalric age, to give them life, color, or force? Men did battle and feats of arms, expecting their ladies to sit at home, to toil and spin and bear them heirs, and, when their time came, haply die. So much we all know. But how much these same women, having something of both soul and brain, may have tried to use them in their small way, who has cared to surmise?