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 fallen into the trance. And the two men
stood side by side in a room in a house in London