That Helen would be very ill, so seriously ill that she would be unable to think of anything except her bodily ailments for some time after the immediate pressure of the actual business imposed upon her by her calamity should have been removed, Mrs. Jenkins felt thoroughly convinced, and therefore she was anxious that all the business which could be got through to-day should be got through; and as the time went on, and no sound of departing footsteps could be heard passing the door from the boudoir, where she and Miss Montressor remained, she was satisfied that they were going into all the matters connected with Mr. Griswold's affairs within Helen's sphere of knowledge thoroughly and at once. In this supposition Mrs. Jenkins was perfectly correct. It had been agreed between Bryan Duval and Thornton Carey that all the information which could possibly be extracted from Mrs. Griswold should be acquired on the present occasion; so that, if possible, she should not again be troubled with the distressing presence of the judicial side of the dreadful occurrence, but left to the tranquillising effect of time and quiet. So, when the four men were ushered into the presence of the young widow, who received them in her husband's library, to enter which and meddle with the papers to which she had never had, during his lifetime, any access, gave her a pang of exceeding sharpness, they found her, as Mrs. Jenkins had described her to her sister at an earlier hour in the morning, very calm, but mortally pale. Throughout the whole of that prolonged interview, under all the forms interrogative, retrospective, speculative, and narrative which it assumed, no change fell upon Helen's face, no tinge of colour touched its waxen paleness; she was perfectly collected, and her natural quickness of apprehension was entirely unimpeded, but her eyes had a fixed vagueness and lightness, produced by overwhelming fatigue and the influence of opiate. Her mechanical, unexcited manner, and patient waiting and submission to the question-and-answer mood adopted by her interlocutors, assisted them materially, and caused them no little astonishment. A woman who always gave the exact answer to the exact question, and never required to have it asked twice, was a novelty in their experience; and as the examination, including in it all the circumstances which had preceded Alston Griswold's departure, progressed, it was plain that unless they could find a clue in the information which they were receiving from Mrs. Griswold, that clue must be sought for in a totally different set and combination of circumstances, for there could be no doubt of the retentiveness and accuracy of her memory and the unembarrassed plainness of her statement of facts.