e."

He stood looking thoughtfully at the waxen figure. "He will never wake,"
he said at last. He sighed "He will never wake again."

CHAPTER III. THE AWAKENING

But Warming was wrong in that. An awakening came.

What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity--the self!
Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the
flux and confluence of its countless factors interweaving, rebuilding,
the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of
the unconscious to the subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning
consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And as it
happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with Graham at
the end of his vast slumber. A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a
cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, recumbent,
faint, but alive.

The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs,
to occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the
time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange
scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression,
too, of a momentous conversation, of a name--he could not tell what
name--that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten
sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the
effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of
dazzling unstable confluent scenes.

Graham became aware his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar
thing.

It was something white, the edge of something, a frame of wood. He
moved his head slightly, following the contour of this shape. It went up
beyond the top of his eyes. He tried to think where he might be. Did it
matter, seeing he was so wretched? The colour of his thoughts was a dark
depression. He felt the featureless misery of one who wakes towards
the hour of dawn. He had an uncertain sense of whispers and footsteps
hastily receding.

The movement of his head involved a perception of extreme physical
weakness. He supposed he was in bed in the hotel at the place in the
valley--but he could not recall that white edge. He must have slept. He
remembered now that he had wanted to sleep. He recalled the cliff and
waterfall again, and then recollected something about talking to a
passer-by.

How long had he slept? What was that sound of pattering feet? And that
rise and fall, like the murmur of breakers on pebbles? H