y sharply. He was numb
to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones concerned in the writing
of "Overdue." So far as other affairs were concerned, he had been in a
trance. For that matter, he was still in a trance. All this life
through which the electric car whirred seemed remote and unreal, and he
would have experienced little interest and less shook if the great stone
steeple of the church he passed had suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon
his head.

At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden's room, and hurried down again.
The room was empty. All luggage was gone.

"Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?" he asked the clerk, who looked at
him curiously for a moment.

"Haven't you heard?" he asked.

Martin shook his head.

"Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed. Suicide.
Shot himself through the head."

"Is he buried yet?" Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one else's
voice, from a long way off, asking the question.

"No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged by
his people saw to the arrangements."

"They were quick about it, I must say," Martin commented.

"Oh, I don't know. It happened five days ago."

"Five days ago?"

"Yes, five days ago."

"Oh," Martin said as he turned and went out.

At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to
The Parthenon, advising them to proceed with the publication of the poem.
He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare home,
so he sent the message collect.

Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days and nights came and
went, and he sat at his table and wrote on. He went nowhere, save to the
pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was hungry and
had something to cook, and just as methodically went without when he had
nothing to cook. Composed as the story was, in advance, chapter by
chapter, he nevertheless saw and developed an opening that increased the
power of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand 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 kno