was any good nor the doing of it, then or ever again, at all worth
while. Nothing seemed to matter.

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