“Thou sayest well, Courtoise. ’Tis true I have neglected her, poor, frail, pretty child! Ah! I had never thought how I have neglected her”; and Gerault sat suddenly down upon the step of the falcon-house and laid his head in his hands, in an attitude of such dejection that Courtoise experienced a swift rush of repentance. For some time there was again silence between them. Courtoise, thoroughly mystified by the whole situation, had nothing whatever to say. Finally the Seigneur stood up, this time with his head high, and his self-control returned. He put the falcon, screaming, into his squire’s hands, and took the bodies of the pigeons from his belt. “So, Courtoise, I leave them all with you. Where is the Lady Lenore?” “Sooth, I know not; yet methinks when she left the armory where she had spoken to me, she passed into the chapel.” “I go to her. And I thank thee, Courtoise, for thy rebuke.” “My lord, my lord, forgive me!” Courtoise choked with a sudden new rush of devotion for his master. He would have fallen on his knees there on the courtyard stones, but that the Seigneur, with a faint smile at him, was gone, carrying alone the burden of his inexplicable sorrow. The Lady Lenore was in the chapel, half kneeling, half lying upon the altar-step. In the dim light of the shadowy place her golden hair and amber-colored garments glimmered faintly. She was not praying, yet neither was she weeping, now. The long, hot loneliness of the afternoon had thrown her into a state of apathy, in which she wished for nothing, and in which she refused to think. She had no desire for company; but had any one come—David, or Alixe, or Madame—she should not have cared. It was only Gerault that she would not have see her in this place and attitude. The thought of Gerault was continually with her, as something omnipresent; but at this especial hour she felt no wish to see the man himself. Yet now he came. She heard a tread on the stones that sent a tremor through her whole body. Then some one was kneeling beside her, and a quiet voice said gently in her ear,— “Lenore!—My child!—Why art thou lying here?” Lenore tried hard to speak; but her throat contracted convulsively, and she made no answer. “Child, art thou sick for thy home? Thou hast found sorrow here, and loneliness, in this new abode. Perhaps thou wouldst have had me oftener at thy side. Is it so, Lenore?” The girl’s golden head burrowed down into her arms, and she seemed to shake it, but she did not speak.