After the night of Gerault’s passion, twelve days ebbed and flowed away without any incident of moment in the Castle. How much bitter heart-life was enacted in that time, it had indeed been difficult to tell. Lenore wondered, constantly, as she looked into the faces about her and questioned them as she refused to question her own heart. If, beneath that cloak of lordly courtesy and calmness, Gerault could hide such a grief as she knew was buried in his soul; if she herself found it so easy to conceal her own knowledge of that bitterest of all facts, that she was a wife unloved,—what stories of mental anguish, of long-hidden torture, might not lie behind the impassive masks around her. There was Madame Eleanore, madame of the commanding presence and infinitely gentle manners. What was it that had generated the expression of her eyes? Lenore had scarcely heard the name of Laure, thought only that there had been a daughter in Crépuscule who had died long since; and so she wove a little history of her own to account for that haunted look so often to be found in madame’s dark orbs. Gerault she knew. Alixe puzzled her, but there also she found food for her morbidness. Courtoise and the demoiselles she did not consider; but David the dwarf held possibilities. The young woman’s new-sharpened glance quickly discovered that the jester suffered also from the devouring malady, and she wondered over and pitied him also. Indeed, at this time, Lenore was in an abnormal and unhealthy frame of mind. It seemed to her that all the world lived only to hide its sorrows. But her melancholy speculations concerning the nature of the griefs of others saved her from the disastrous effects of too much self-analysis. Her love for Gerault, to which she always clung, led her to pity him as he would not have believed she could have pitied any one; and, unnatural as it seemed, she brooded as much over his sorrow as over her own. Melancholy she was, indeed, and older by many years than when she had first come to Le Crépuscule. Sometimes the fact that Gerault did not know how much she knew brought her a measure of comfort, but it made her uneasy, also, for she was not sure that she was not wrongfully deceiving him. She could not bring herself to confess to Father Anselm what she felt no one should know; and neither did she find it in her heart to tell Gerault himself of her inadvertent discovery, though had she but done this last, all might have come right in the end. But from day to day she put away from her the thought of speaking, and from day to day she drew closer into herself, till she was shut to all thought of confiding in him who had the right to know the reason of her unhappiness.