additional words.  It was not that there was any vital need that the thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well.  He worked on in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former life.  He remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense enough to know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were really dead did unaware of it.

Came the day when “Overdue” was finished.  The agent of the type-writer firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin, on the one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter.  “Finis,” he wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis.  He watched the type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of relief, then went over and lay down on the bed.  He was faint from hunger.  Food had not passed his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about it.  He lay on his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or stupor slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness.  Half in delirium, he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden had been fond of quoting to him.  Maria, listening anxiously outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance.  The words in themselves were not significant to her, but the fact that he was saying them was.  “I have done,” was the burden of the poem.

   “’I have done—­
   Put by the lute. 
   Song and singing soon are over
   As the airy shades that hover
   In among the purple clover. 
   I have done—­
   Put by the lute. 
   Once I sang as early thrushes
   Sing among the dewy bushes;
   Now I’m mute. 
   I am like a weary linnet,
   For my throat has no song in it;
   I have had my singing minute. 
   I have done. 
   Put by the lute.’”

Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion’s share of chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of the pot.  Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever.

After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the morning’s mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into his darkened brain.  It is The Parthenon, he thought, the August Parthenon, and it must contain “Ephemera.”  If only Brissenden were here to see!