In spite of Bertrand’s words about his early departure on the following morning, he and Yvain did not go that day. Neither did they depart on the next, nor within that week. On the morning after his arrival the minstrel confessed, readily enough, though with seeming reluctance, that he had no particular objective point in his journeying; that he but travelled for adventure, for love of his lady, and that it was his mind to linger around St. Nazaire or the coast till spring should give an opening into Normandy. Madame Eleanore would not hear of it that he should seek lodgings in St. Nazaire. There was strong tradition of hospitality in Le Crépuscule,—ordinarily a lonely place enough; and its châtelaine eagerly besought the Flaming-heart to lodge with her till spring—and longer if he would. And after that she put him, forsooth, into the Bishop’s chamber on the ground-floor, gave Yvain an adjoining closet, and would take no refusal that he go hawking in the early afternoon with all the young squires of the Castle. Bertrand took to his life at the Twilight Castle with a grace, an ease, and, withal, a tact that won him every heart within the first three days of his residence there. He was a man of the broad world, such an one as these simple Breton folk had not known before; for Seigneur Gerault did not travel like this fellow, and had none of his manner for setting forth tales. The young squires, the men-at-arms, the henchmen, the very cooks and scullions, listened open-mouthed and open-eyed at the stories he told of adventure and love, of distant countries, of kings and courts and mighty wars. Besides this, he could manage a horse or a sword like any warrior knight; he was deep learned in falconry; he could track a hare or a fox through the most impossible furze; and he could read like a monk and write like a scribe. As for his accomplishments with the other sex, they were too many to mention. Before evening of the second day every woman in the Castle from Madame Eleanore down, save, for some mysterious reason, Alixe, was at his feet, confessing her utter subjection. His soft Southern speech, the exquisite Langue d’Oc, used in Brittany as French was used in England; his clean, dark, fine-featured face; his glowing eyes; his love-laden manner, that ever dared and never presumed; finally, what, in all ages, has seemed to prove most attractive to women in men, a suggestion of past libertinism,—all these things combined to make him utterly irresistible to the feminine heart.