So passed the first two days of his consciousness, and the speed at which the clock of his mind was regulated made the world’s time seem interminable.  When the two days had gone they seemed to him to be lengthy, not as two weeks or years or anything in a known measure of counting, but as some period of time spaced quite differently.  This is the time that only sick people know, that fills their eyes with knowledge not understood of the healthy sympathisers beside their beds, who, though they may have sat the nights and days out with them, yet have not the same measure to count the passing of their hours.

With the third day came pain, bodily pain, and that saved Ishmael.  It seemed to him then that physical hurts were so far worse than mental that his dread depression vanished before it.  He would have welcomed that back to save his body a pang; it seemed to him his head must burst with the pain raging in it, and he cared about nothing else in the world.  When that too passed he was as one who has floated out of stormy seas into smooth waters—­too weak to navigate them, but blissfully aware that it does not matter, they are safe and he can drift with the current.  It was only then he began to talk, and he never once referred to what had happened.  He asked where Archelaus was, and when he heard he had gone back to his work in the mine that day he said no more.  And it was characteristic of Ishmael that no one ever knew whether he were aware of that impulse of his brother’s, and what it had nearly led to, or not.  With cessation of physical pain and the exhaustion of the high-keyed string of his mind, came blessed reaction.  Even the fact that nothing mattered ceased to matter.  The suggestion, emanating simultaneously from the Parson and Killigrew that he should accompany the latter back to London stirred him to only a faint thrill—­indeed, a certain disinclination to accept the offer was almost as strong as the urgings of the common sense which told him that soon he would be won to pleasure and interest, once the initial effort was over.  Still, as the days slipped past, he found himself looking forward more and more keenly.

On the afternoon before he was to go to town he was resting on a couch in his room when the sounds of Vassie’s arrogant but not unpleasing voice came floating up to him from the parlour as she sang her latest song, the fashionable “Maiden’s Prayer.”  He smiled a little to himself; he could picture Killigrew, leaning attentive, turning the pages, smiling between narrowed lids at the lovely thing she looked—­chin raised and full throat vibrant—­yet giving so little away beyond his admiration.  The song faded, silence fell, then a door opened and closed.  Vassie’s voice was raised, this time in welcome.  He guessed the visitor to be Phoebe from the fluttered feminine quality of the sounds below—­staccato sentences whose words he could not catch, but whose very rhythm, broken and eager, betrayed them.  A moment later, and a knock came at his door.