By this time the detective story had fallen to the floor, and Tom was huddled up in his chair, asleep.  He arose obediently and wrapped a wet towel around his head, and began to write.  Once he paused long enough to mutter:—­“Yes, that’s about it,—­that’s the way I felt!” and set to work again, mechanically,—­all the praise I got for what I deemed a literary achievement of the highest order!  At three o’clock, a.m., he finished, pulled off his clothes automatically and tumbled into bed.  I had no desire for sleep.  My brain was racing madly, like an engine without a governor.  I could write!  I could write!  I repeated the words over and over to myself.  All the complexities of my present life were blotted out, and I beheld only the long, sweet vista of the career for which I was now convinced that nature had intended me.  My immediate fortunes became unimportant, immaterial.  No juice of the grape I had ever tasted made me half so drunk....  With the morning, of course, came the reaction, and I suffered the after sensations of an orgie, awaking to a world of necessity, cold and grey and slushy, and necessity alone made me rise from my bed.  My experience of the night before might have taught me that happiness lies in the trick of transforming necessity, but it did not.  The vision had faded,—­temporarily, at least; and such was the distraction of the succeeding days that the subject of the theme passed from my mind....

One morning Tom was later than usual in getting home.  I was writing a letter when he came in, and did not notice him, yet I was vaguely aware of his standing over me.  When at last I looked up I gathered from his expression that something serious had happened, so mournful was his face, and yet so utterly ludicrous.

“Say, Hugh, I’m in the deuce of a mess,” he announced.

“What’s the matter?” I inquired.

He sank down on the table with a groan.

“It’s Alonzo,” he said.

Then I remembered the theme.

“What—­what’s he done?” I demanded.

“He says I must become a writer.  Think of it, me a writer!  He says I’m a young Shakespeare, that I’ve been lazy and hid my light under a bushel!  He says he knows now what I can do, and if I don’t keep up the quality, he’ll know the reason why, and write a personal letter to my father.  Oh, hell!”

In spite of his evident anguish, I was seized with a convulsive laughter.  Tom stood staring at me moodily.

“You think it’s funny,—­don’t you?  I guess it is, but what’s going to become of me?  That’s what I want to know.  I’ve been in trouble before, but never in any like this.  And who got me into it?  You!”

Here was gratitude!

“You’ve got to go on writing ’em, now.”  His voice became desperately pleading.  “Say, Hugh, old man, you can temper ’em down—­temper ’em down gradually.  And by the end of the year, let’s say, they’ll be about normal again.”

He seemed actually shivering.