“Gerault, Gerault, if I could by prayer or anger make thee to understand for one instant only! Ah, ’tis the same tale that every woman has to tell. It was so with me. In my early youth I was brought from bright Laval, where I was a queen of gayety and life, to rule alone over this great Twilight Castle. Thy grandam was dead; and there was no other woman of my station here. In a few months after my home-coming as a bride, thy father rode away to join the army of Montfort in the East. From that time I saw my lord but a few weeks in every year; for the war lasted till I had reached the age of four-and-thirty. Thou camest to cheer my loneliness; and then, long after, Laure. And at last, when Laure was in her first babyhood, seventeen years agone, the long struggle ended at Auray; and then my lord, sore wounded in his last fight, came home. Alas! I was no happier for his coming. He had suffered much, and he was no longer young. We two, so long separated, were almost as strangers one to the other. Thou wast his great pride; dost remember how he loved to have thee near him? And many a time it cut me to the heart to hear the bloody, valorous tales he poured into thine ears; for I knew by them that he meant thee to do what he had done. It was not till he lay in his mortal sickness that we came back one to the other; but he died in my arms, whispering to me such words as I had never had from him before. That last is a sweet memory, Gerault; but the tale is none the less grievous of my young life here. And there is the more pity of it that mine is not the only story of such things. Many and many is the weary life led by some high-born lady in her castle, while her lord fights or jousts or drinks his life out in his own selfishness. Through those long years of the war of the Three Jeannes, I suffered not alone of women; and how I suffered, thou canst never know. Do thou not likewise with thy frail Lenore. Stay with her here a little while, and make her life what it might be made with love.” Gerault listened in non-committal silence. When she finished he turned and faced her squarely: “Hast made this prate of my father and thee to Lenore?” he asked severely. “Gerault!” The exclamation escaped involuntarily; when it was out Eleanore bit her lip and drew herself up haughtily. “Thou’rt insolent,” she said in a tone that she would have used to an inferior. In that moment her son found something in her to admire, but the man and master in him was all alive. “Madame, we will waste no further words. I crave the honor to wish you a good-night.” And with a profound and ironical bow, he turned from the room, leaving Eleanore alone to the darkness, and to what was a defeat as bitter as any she had ever known.