w 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!

He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
"Ephemera" had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and Beardsley-like
margin decorations. On one side of the