lloused
hand upon his hot forehead and felt his pulse.

"You lika da eat?" she asked.

He shook his head. Eating was farthest from his desire, and he wondered
that he should ever have been hungry in his life.

"I'm sick, Maria," he said weakly. "What is it? Do you know?"

"Grip," she answered. "Two or three days you alla da right. Better you
no eat now. Bimeby plenty can eat, to-morrow can eat maybe."

Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and her little girl left
him, he essayed to get up and dress. By a supreme exertion of will, with
rearing brain and eyes that ached so that he could not keep them open, he
managed to get out of bed, only to be left stranded by his senses upon
the table. Half an hour later he managed to regain the bed, where he was
content to lie with closed eyes and analyze his various pains and
weaknesses. Maria came in several times to change the cold cloths on his
forehead. Otherwise she left him in peace, too wise to vex him with
chatter. This moved him to gratitude, and he murmured to himself,
"Maria, you getta da milka ranch, all righta, all right."

Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday.

It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from the
Transcontinental, a life-time since it was all over and done with and a
new page turned. He had shot his bolt, and shot it hard, and now he was
down on his back. If he hadn't starved himself, he wouldn't have been
caught by La Grippe. He had been run down, and he had not had the
strength to throw off the germ of disease which had invaded his system.
This was what resulted.

"What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own
life?" he demanded aloud. "This is no place for me. No more literature
in mine. Me for the counting-house and ledger, the monthly salary, and
the little home with Ruth."

Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of toast and drunk a
cup of tea, he asked for his mail, but found his eyes still hurt too much
to permit him to read.

"You read for me, Maria," he said. "Never mind the big, long letters.
Throw them under the table. Read me the small letters."

"No can," was the answer. "Teresa, she go to school, she can."

So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read them to him. He
listened absently to a long dun from the type-writer people, his mind
busy with ways and means of finding a job. Suddenly he was shocked back
to himself.