elf unable
to divine with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's feverish
search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed.
Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she
had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of
time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck
from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, 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 complet