of an old friend. "Don't worry yourself. Trust to
me."

The man dropped his hand and turned again. They
went over the brow in single file and to the headland
beyond Penally, with the sleepless man gesticulating
ever and again, and speaking fragmentary things
concerning his whirling brain. At the headland they
stood for a space by the seat that looks into the dark


mysteries of Blackapit, and then he sat down. Isbister
had resumed his talk whenever the path had widened
sufficiently for them to walk abreast. He was enlarging
upon the complex difficulty of making Boscastle
Harbour in bad weather, when suddenly and quite
irrelevantly his companion interrupted him again.

"My head is not like what it was," he said, gesticulating
for want of expressive phrases. "It's not like
what it was. There is a sort of oppression, a weight.
No -- not drowsiness, would God it were! It is like
a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and swiftly
across something busy. Spin, spin into the darkness
The tumult of thought, the confusion, the eddy and
eddy. I can't express it. I can hardly keep my mind
on it -- steadily enough to tell you."

He stopped feebly.