Gerault, however, was not unobserving, and he noticed the change in her very early in its existence. It was an intangible thing, elusive, changeable, varying in degree. All this he realized; but, man-like, never guessed the reason for it, never knew that Lenore herself was unconscious of it. Did she desire to coquet with him, render him uneasily jealous of every one on whom she turned her eyes? If so, it was useless, for the knight believed himself incapable of jealousy in regard to her. He had married her for the sake of his mother, and for Le Crépuscule,—much as the fact did him dishonor. In the very hour of their highest love, his thoughts had been all for another; and when she slept he had left her side to cry into the night and the silence, unto that other, of whom this young Lenore had never heard. Despite these confessed things, the Seigneur Gerault felt in some way hurt when the timid shadow of his wife no longer haunted him by day, nor stretched to his protecting arm by night. She had withdrawn from him into herself, and even his occasional half-hours of devotion failed to bring any light into her eyes, though she treated him always with half-tender courtesy. Her lord was not a little puzzled by her new manner, but he took it in his own way; and there was presently a stiffness of demeanor between the two that would have been almost laughable had it not been so pathetically cruel to Lenore. The month of July passed away, and August came into the land. Brittany, long blazing with sunlight, lay parching for want of rain. The moors grew brown and dusty, and the meadow flowers bloomed no more. But the blue sea shimmered radiantly day by day, and the sunsets were ever more glorious and more red. On a day in the first week of the last summer month, when Anselm had found the temperature too great for the casting of choice paragraphs of Cicero before the unheeding demoiselles, when the Castle reeked with the smell of cooking, and the air outside was heavy with the odor of hard-baked earth, Gerault sat in the long room alone, reading Seneca from an illuminated text. A heretical document this, and not to be found in a monastery or holy place; yet there were in it such scraps of homely wisdom and comfort as the Seigneur—something of a scholar in his idle hours—had failed to find in Holy Scripture. In its dimly lighted silence the long room was, at this hour, a soothing place. The row of small casement windows were open to the sea, and two or three swallows, coming up from the water below, flitted through the room, and once even a sleek and well-fed gull came to sit upon a sill and flap his wings over the flavor of his last fish.