For a long time Ralph sat and stared at this document; then he began to laugh and tossed it into the scrap-basket.  After that, with a groan, he dropped his head against the edge of his writing table.

XXII

When he woke, the first thing he remembered was the fact of having cried.

He could not think how he had come to be such a fool.  He hoped to heaven no one had seen him.  He supposed he must have been worrying about the unfinished piece of work at the office:  where was it, by the way, he wondered?  Why—­where he had left it the day before, of course!  What a ridiculous thing to worry about—­but it seemed to follow him about like a dog...

He said to himself that he must get up presently and go down to the office.  Presently—­when he could open his eyes.  Just now there was a dead weight on them; he tried one after another in vain.  The effort set him weakly trembling, and he wanted to cry again.  Nonsense!  He must get out of bed.

He stretched his arms out, trying to reach something to pull himself up by; but everything slipped away and evaded him.  It was like trying to catch at bright short waves.  Then suddenly his fingers clasped themselves about something firm and warm.  A hand:  a hand that gave back his pressure!  The relief was inexpressible.  He lay still and let the hand hold him, while mentally he went through the motions of getting up and beginning to dress.  So indistinct were the boundaries between thought and action that he really felt himself moving about the room, in a queer disembodied way, as one treads the air in sleep.  Then he felt the bedclothes over him and the pillows under his head.

“I must get up,” he said, and pulled at the hand.

It pressed him down again:  down into a dim deep pool of sleep.  He lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body.  But his body had never been more alive.  Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth.  They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an arrowy sky.

Charmed intervals of rest, blue sailings on melodious seas, alternated with the anguish.  He became a leaf on the air, a feather on a current, a straw on the tide, the spray of the wave spinning itself to sunshine as the wave toppled over into gulfs of blue...

He woke on a stony beach, his legs and arms still lashed to his sides and the thongs cutting into him; but the fierce sky was hidden, and hidden by his own languid lids.  He felt the ecstasy of decreasing pain, and courage came to him to open his eyes and look about him...

The beach was his own bed; the tempered light lay on familiar things, and some one was moving about in a shadowy way between bed and window.  He was thirsty and some one gave him a drink.  His pillow burned, and some one turned the cool side out.  His brain was clear enough now for him to understand that he was ill, and to want to talk about it; but his tongue hung in his throat like a clapper in a bell.  He must wait till the rope was pulled...