All that afternoon and night, indeed, till after dawn of the next day, weary henchmen of the keep came straggling in on spent horses, fruitless returned from a fruitless quest. And when they were all back again, and the hope of seeing Laure was gone, the shadow of loneliness settled a little lower over the great pile of stone, and the silence within the Castle grew more and more intense to the aching heart within. In the general desolation of Castle life Alixe, the unnatural child of peasant blood, came very close to the heart of Eleanore. Through the long, budding spring madame fought a terrible battle with herself against an overpowering desire for an end of life, for the peace of death. And in these times Alixe often drew her away from herself by getting her to hunt and to hawk,—two amusements in which madame had been wont to indulge eagerly in her youth, and which she found were still possible for her, though she had grown to what she thought old-womanhood. Besides this, she and Alixe took the long walks that Laure had formerly delighted in; and the two ventured into many a deep cave in the sea-cliffs, and explored many crevices that no native of the coast would enter. In these places they found fair treasures of the sea, but were never accosted by any of the supernatural beings said to inhabit such spots. Nor, though they listened many times for it at twilight, did either of them hear, a single time, the long, low, wailing cries of the spirit of the lost Lenore. In this way some pleasures entered unawares into the life of Eleanore. Perhaps there were other pleasures also, so simple and so familiar that she took no cognizance of them as such. Perhaps of a morning, in the spinning-room, when her fingers flew under some familiar, pretty task, and her ears were filled with the chatter of the demoiselles, who still strove after light-hearted joys amid their gray surroundings, she found forgetfulness of Laure’s bitter disgrace. Or better still, when, at the sunset hour, she paced the grassy falcon-field, watching the glories of the sea and sky, there came to her heart that benison of Nature that God has devised for all of us in our days of woe. But when she was alone, in early afternoon, or, most of all, through the silent night-watches, she was sometimes overcome with sheer terror of herself and of her solitude. At such times she fought the creeping horror with what weapons time had given her, battling so bravely that she never suffered utter rout. In a dim, quiet way the weeks sped on, leaving behind them no trace of what had been, nothing for memory to hang her lightest fabric on. In all the weeks that lay between Laure’s flight and the coming of July, Eleanore could remember distinctly just one talk beside the bitter one with St. Nazaire. And this other was with neither Alixe nor the Bishop, who, however, made it a point to come once in a fortnight to Le Crépuscule.