Madame stopped speaking, and there was a pause. David seemed to have no response to make to her words. Instead he bent over the earth, digging a little hole in the sod. Into this he laid the dead form of his white butterfly. When he had covered it from sight with the black earth, and patted a little earthen mound over it, he rose to his feet with an exaggerated sigh. “So I bury my friend—and my freedom. My desire is dead, Madame Eleanore, with my freedom. I will remain here among you women-folk, and keep you sad company or merry as you demand. Look! The rim of the sun is pushing over the line of the distant trees!” “Yea, it is there—far away—in the land where Laure may be, deserted, mayhap, and a wanderer, cast out from every dwelling that she enters!” Eleanore whispered these words, more to herself than to David. They were an expression of her eternal thought. The dwarf heard them, and sought some comfort for her. But her expression forbade comfort; and, in the end, he did not speak at all. The two of them stood side by side and watched the sun come up the heavens. Presently the Castle awoke, and shortly Alixe came out to the field to feed the young _niais_ and the mother-birds in the falcon-nests. So Eleanore, when she had given the young girl greeting, returned to her solitude in the Castle, finding her heart in some part relieved of its immediate burden. One by one the lengthening days passed. June came into the world, and palpitated, and glowed with glory and fire, and then died. During this time not a word had come from distant Rennes to tell the Lady of Crépuscule how Gerault fared. The midsummer month came in, and the young men and maidens of the Castle grew gay with the heat, and made riotous expenditure of the riches of Nature. That year the whole earth seemed a tangle of flowers and rich meadow-grass, with which young demoiselles played havoc, while the squires and henchmen hawked and hunted and drank deep. These days stirred Eleanore’s heart once more to love of life, and woke the sleeping soul of Alixe to strange fits of passionate yearning after unattainable ideals. The living earth brought fire to every soul, and the pinched melancholy of winter was dead and forgotten.