ids. He was suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of
the man's condition, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. "Are you
asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again, "Are you
asleep?"

A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He
suddenly became active and noisy, strode across the room, blundering
against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.

"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage. "There is
something wrong with my friend."

Then he returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder,
shook it, and shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his
astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was white as he
turned blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor at once," he said.
"It is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village? Where is
a doctor to be found?"

CHAPTER II. THE TRANCE

The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted
for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the
flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it
was his eyes could be closed.

He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the
surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every
attempt at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear
later, these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in
that strange condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as
it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence.
His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a
dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had
swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man?
Where is any man when insensibility takes hold of him?

"It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as
though it happened yesterday--clearer perhaps, than if it had happened
yesterday."

It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a
young man. The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the
fashionable length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that
had been pink and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard shot
with grey. He talked to an elderly man who wore a summer suit of drill
(the summer of that year was unusually hot). This was Warming, a London
solicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fall