“I know,” said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.

They peered through the glass again.  Graham was indeed in a strange state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in medical history.  Trances had lasted for as much as a year before—­but at the end of that time it had ever been a waking or a death; sometimes first one and then the other.  Isbister noted the marks the physicians had made in injecting nourishment, for that had been resorted to to postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying not to see them.

“And while he has been lying here,” said Isbister, with the zest of a life freely spent, “I have changed my plans in life; married, raised a family, my eldest lad—­I hadn’t begun to think of sons then—­is an American citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard.  There’s a touch of grey in my hair.  And this man, not a day older nor wiser (practically) than I was in my downy days.  It’s curious to think of.”

Warming turned.  “And I have grown old too.  I played cricket with him when I was still only a boy.  And he looks a young man still.  Yellow perhaps.  But that is a young man nevertheless.”

“And there’s been the War,” said Isbister.

“From beginning to end.”

“And these Martians.”

“I’ve understood,” said Isbister after a pause, “that he had some moderate property of his own?”

“That is so,” said Warming.  He coughed primly.  “As it happens—­I have charge of it.”

“Ah!” Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke:  “No doubt—­his keep here is not expensive—­no doubt it will have improved—­accumulated?”

“It has.  He will wake up very much better off—­if he wakes—­than when he slept.”

“As a business man,” said Isbister, “that thought has naturally been in my mind.  I have, indeed, sometimes thought that, speaking commercially, of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for him.  That he knows what he is about, so to speak, in being insensible so long.  If he had lived straight on—­”

“I doubt if he would have premeditated as much,” said Warming.  “He was not a far-sighted man.  In fact—­”

“Yes?”

“We differed on that point.  I stood to him somewhat in the relation of a guardian.  You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise that occasionally a certain friction—.  But even if that was the case, there is a doubt whether he will ever wake.  This sleep exhausts slowly, but it exhausts.  Apparently he is sliding slowly, very slowly and tediously, down a long slope, if you can understand me?”

“It will be a pity to lose his surprise.  There’s been a lot of change these twenty years.  It’s Rip Van Winkle come real.”

“There has been a lot of change certainly,” said Warming.  “And, among other changes, I have changed.  I am an old man.”

Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise.  “I shouldn’t have thought it.”