The book seemed to float away from him. The light vanished.
He wondered dimly if this could be Death, coming so suddenly, so
quietly,
so irresistibly. He struggled for a moment to hold himself up,
and then sank slowly forward upon the table. His head rested
upon
his folded hands. He slipped into the unknown.

How long afterward conscious life returned to him he did not
know.
The blank might have been an hour or a century. He knew only
that
omething had happened in the interval. What is was he could not
tell.
He found great difficulty in catching the thread of his identity
again.
He felt that he was himself; but the trouble was to make his
connections,
to verify and place himself, to know who and where he was.

At last it grew clear. John Weightman was sitting on a stone,
not far from a road in a strange land.

The road was not a formal highway, fenced and graded. It was
more like
a great travel-trace, worn by thousands of feet passing across
the open country in the same direction. Down in the valley,
into which he could look, the road seemed to form itself
gradually out of
many minor paths; little footways coming across the meadows,