it cliffs about them
and back to that face of despair For a moment he was silent.

He started, and made a gesture of impatient rejection. "You get a
night's sleep," he said, "and you won't see much misery out here. Take
my word for it."

He was quite sure now that this was a providential encounter. Only half
an hour ago he had been feeling horribly bored. Here was employment the
bare thought of which was righteous self-applause. He took possession
forthwith. It seemed to him that the first need of this exhausted being
was companionship He flung himself down on the steeply sloping turf
beside the motionless seated figure, and deployed forthwith into a
skirmishing line of gossip.

His hearer seemed to have lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally
seaward, and spoke only in answer to Isbister's direct questions--and
not to all of those But he made no sign of objection to this benevolent
intrusion upon his despair.

In a helpless way he seemed even grateful, and when presently Isbister,
feeling that his unsupported talk was losing vigour, suggested that they
should reascend the steep and return towards Boscastle, alleging the
view into Blackapit, he submitted quietly. Halfway up he began talking
to himself, and abruptly turned a ghastly face on his helper. "What can
be happening?" he asked with a gaunt illustrative hand. "What can be
happening? Spin, spin, spin, spin. It goes round and round, round and
round for evermore."

He stood with his hand circling

"It's all right, old chap," said Isbister with the air 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 suddenl