ely 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.

V

"I don't say it WASN'T straight, yet don't say it WAS straight. It was
business."

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at
the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" on it had been
brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been
a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of
Boyne's unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a
small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it
sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person to
whom her husband's last known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a man who
has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of his visit.
He had "run over" to England on business, and finding himself in the
neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying
his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if the occasion offered,
what she meant to do about Bob Elwell's family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's bosom.
Did her visitor, afte