Courtoise bent his head, answering in a strained voice: “My lord had news of—of the flight late in the month of March. Monseigneur de St. Nazaire sent us the word of it, and for many weeks my lord hunted the country over for a trace of her. And when he found her not, nor any word of her, he forbore, in his grief, to write to thee, dear lady, lest he should cause thy tears to flow again.” “I thank the good God that he knows!” murmured Eleanore. “It had been more than I could bear that Gerault should come home to find his wedding feast blackened with a new-learned shame.” “Yea, Lady Eleanore.” “And so now, Courtoise, go thou to thy rest; for I have kept thee long, and thou’rt very weary. And on the morrow there must be a beginning of making the Castle bravely gay for the home-coming of its lord and its bride. Likewise, on the morrow thou must tell me more of the young Lenore, my daughter.” Courtoise smiled wearily, and then, with proper obeisance, hurried off to his own room, a little triangular closet opening into Gerault’s old bedroom on the first floor. When the squire was gone, his liege lady also laid her down; and for the first time in many months sank easily to sleep. For happiness is the best of doctors, and this that had come to her was a greater happiness than Eleanore had thought ever to know again. Through the next week the very dogs about the Castle caught the air of bustle and eager life that had laid hold of it. Never, since the days of the old lord and his crews of drinking barons, had Le Crépuscule shown such symptoms of gayety. Every scullion scampered about his pots and kettles as if an army of Brittany depended on him for nourishment. The henchmen hurried about, polishing their armor and their steel trappings till the keep glittered as with many mirrors, and they broke off from this labor now and then to see that the stable-boys were at work on the proper horses or to dissolve into thunderous roars of laughter at a neighbor’s jest. The young demoiselles were giddy with excitement. They pricked their fingers with spindles, they broke innumerable threads on the wheels, they stopped the loom to dance or sing in the middle of the morning; and while they were arranging the rooms where the train of the young bride were to lodge, they gossiped so ardently over possible future gayeties that their very tongues were like to drop off with weariness. As for the squires, all five of them, headed by Courtoise, were to ride out to Croitôt on the Rennes road, as an additional escort for Seigneur Gerault. And the parade they made over this matter was more than Montfort had for his coronation at Rennes when the great war ended.