The torturing week came slowly to an end. On the final night, after compline, she went to her cell feeling like a spirit condemned to eternal night. Once alone, face to face with her soul, she sat down upon a chair, bent her head upon her breast, and thought. She did not extinguish her light, neither did she make preparations for bed. Unconsciously she set herself to wait through the hour following compline, as if its finish would bring the end of her trial. The minutes were passing smoothly by, and there was a great, unuttered cry of terror in her heart. What should she do? Nay, at the last minute, what _would_ she do? Here her mind broke. She could think no more. Her brain was a vacuum. Presently her muscles began to twitch. Her flesh became cold and damp, and the hot saliva poured into her mouth. Would that hour never end? It ended. By now Flammecœur was in the garden, three hundred feet away. Flammecœur was waiting for her. Horses were there, and garments for her,—other garments than these of sickening white wool. How long would the trouvère wait? Till matins, he had said. But if that were not true? If he should go before—if he were going _now_! Laure started to her feet, halted, hesitated, then sank slowly to her knees. The first words of a prayer came from her lips; but in the middle of the phrase she was silent. Prayer was suddenly nothing to her. She had prayed so much; she had prayed so long! The beauty of appeals to the Most High was lost just now. She felt all the weight of her never-satisfied religion upon her, and she revolted at it. For the moment love itself seemed desirable only in so much as it would get her away from this place of her hypocrisy. A sudden thought of her mother came to her. For one moment—two—five—she kept her mind fixed. Then she sobbed. Flammecœur was below, calling to her with every fibre of his being. She knew that. She could see him waiting there, her cloak over his arm. With a low wail she stretched out her arms to the mental image. Afterwards, scarcely knowing what she did, she knelt down before the bright-painted picture of the Madonna on the wall of her cell, and kissed the stones of the floor below it. Then she stood up, pressing her hands tightly to her throat to ease the pain there. She looked around her, and in that look saw everything in the little stone room that had for so long been her home. Then, removing from her head the coif, wimple, and veil, the symbols of her virginity, she extinguished her lantern, and walked, blindly and wearily, out of her cell. So she passed, without making any noise, through the convent, into the library, and out—out—out into the garden beyond. Instantly Flammecœur was at her side. “Laure!” cried he, half laughing in his triumph. “Laure! Now we shall go!” Over his arm he carried a voluminous black mantle and a close, dark hood. These he put upon her, getting small assistance in the matter, for Laure’s movements were wooden, her hands like ice.