Colin never ascertained what were the events immediately succeeding his plunge into the canal; all he could recall dimly of that strange crisis in his life was a sense of slow motion in which he himself was passive, and of looking up at the stars in a dark-blue, frosty, winterly sky, with a vague wonder in his mind how it was that he saw them so clearly, and whether it was they or he that moved. Afterwards, when his mind became clear, it grew apparent to him that he must have opened his eyes for a moment while he was being carried home; but there intervened a period during which he heard nothing distinctly, and in which the only clear point to him was this gleam of starlight, and the accompanying sense of motion, which perplexed his faculties in his weakness. While he lay feverish and unconscious he kept repeating, to the amazement of the bystanders, two stray lines which had no apparent connexion with any of the circumstances surrounding him.
“Each with its little span of sky, And little lot of stars,”
poor Colin said to himself over and over, without knowing it. It had been only for a moment that he opened his eyes out of the torpor which was all but death, but that moment was enough to colour all the wanderings of his mind while still the weakness of the body dominated and overpowered it. Like a picture or a dream, he kept in his recollection the sharp frosty glimmer, the cold twinkling of those passionless, distant lights, and with it a sense of rushing air and universal chill, and a sound and consciousness of wending his way between rustling hedges, though all the while he was immovable. That feeling remained with him till he woke from a long sleep one afternoon when the twilight was setting in, and found himself in a room which was not his own room, lying in a great bed hung with crimson curtains, which were made still more crimson by a ruddy glow of fire-light which flashed reflections out of the great mirror opposite the end of the bed. Colin lay a while in a pause of wonder and confusion when he woke. The starlight went out of his eyes and the chill out of his frame, and a certain sense of languid comfort came over him. When he said, “Where am I?” faintly, in a voice which he could scarcely recognise for his own, two women rose hastily and approached him. One of these was Lady Frankland, the other a nurse. While the attendant hurried forward to see if he wanted anything, Lady Frankland took his hand and pressed it warmly in both hers.