Day by day she rose to perform the same monotonous duties, sustained by no lofty aim, cheered by neither friendship nor affection; for she could not teach herself to feel anything warmer than toleration for her daily companion, Mrs.
Tadman--only working laboriously because existence was more endurable to her when she was busy than when she was idle.

It was scarcely strange, then, that she brooded upon the memory of that night when the nameless stranger had come to Wyncomb, and that she tried to put the fact of his coming and that other incident of the cry together, and to make something out of the two events by that means; but put them together as she might, she was no nearer any solution of the mystery.

That her husband and the stranger could have failed to hear that piercing shriek seemed almost impossible: yet both had denied hearing it.

The story of the stranger having knocked his shin and cried out on doing so, appeared like a feeble attempt to account for that wild cry.

Vain and hopeless were all her endeavours to arrive at any reasonable explanation, and her attempts to get anything like an opinion out of Mrs.Tadman were utterly useless.