gained assurance as the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal gait.  And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event.  No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity.  It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat.  There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence.  She watched the familiar routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression.  She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables.  And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of “change.”  Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting.  But in reality she had no such belief:  the depths of anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope.  She was sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold.  She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and her own agonized imagination.  In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him—­no one would ever know.  But the house knew; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew.  For it was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him.  The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret.  But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come.  Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them.  Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised.  And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means.