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