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