My body and senses slept, for I was utterly¹ tired, but my brain all the night was on fire with horrid² fancies. Again I was in that accursed cave; I was torturing my hands in the fire; I was slipping barefoot among jagged boulders³; and then with bursting heart I was toiling⁴ the last mile with the cottage light — now grown to a great fire in the heavens — blazing before me.

It was broad daylight when I awoke, and I thanked God for the comfortable rays of the sun. I had been laid in a box-bed off the inner room, and my first sight was the shepherd sitting with folded arms in a chair regarding me solemnly. I rose and began to dress, feeling my legs and arms still tremble with weariness. The shepherd’s sister bound up my scarred wrists and put an ointment⁵ on my burns; and limping like an old man, I went into the kitchen.

I could eat little breakfast, for my throat seemed dry and narrow; but they gave me some brandy-and-milk, which put strength into my body. All the time the brother and sister sat in silence, regarding me with covert⁶ glances.

‘Ye have been delivered from the jaws⁷ o’ the Pit,’ said the man at length. ‘See that,’ and he held out to me a thin shaft⁸ of flint. ‘I fand that in the door this morning.’

I took it, let it drop, and stared vacantly at the window. My nerves had been too much tried to be roused by any new terror. Out of doors it was fair weather, flying gleams of April sunlight and the soft colours of spring. I felt dazed, isolated⁹, cut off from my easy past and pleasing future, a companion of horrors and the sport of nameless things. Then suddenly my eye fell on my books heaped on a table, and the old distant

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