fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these
inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts
concerning the Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have
had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the
facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and
he declared himself 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