Hardly had he disappeared when Ernest awoke.  For a moment he looked around, like a hunted animal, then sighed with relief and buried his head in his hand.  At that moment a knock at the door was heard, and Reginald re-entered, calm as before.

“I declare,” he exclaimed, “you have certainly been sleeping the sleep of the just.”

“It isn’t laziness,” Ernest replied, looking up rather pleased at the interruption.  “But I’ve a splitting headache.”

“Perhaps those naps are not good for your health.”

“Probably.  But of late I have frequently found it necessary to exact from the day-hours the sleep which the night refuses me.  I suppose it is all due to indigestion, as you have suggested.  The stomach is the source of all evil.”

“It is also the source of all good.  The Greeks made it the seat of the soul.  I have always claimed that the most important item in a great poet’s biography is an exact reproduction of his menu.”

“True, a man who eats a heavy beefsteak for breakfast in the morning is incapable of writing a sonnet in the afternoon.”

“Yes,” Reginald added, “we are what we eat and what our forefathers have eaten before us.  I ascribe the staleness of American poetry to the griddle-cakes of our Puritan ancestors.  I am sorry we cannot go deeper into the subject at present.  But I have an invitation to dinner where I shall study, experimentally, the influence of French sauces on my versification.”

“Good-bye.”

“Au revoir.”  And, with a wave of the hand, Reginald left the room.

When the door had closed behind him, Ernest’s thoughts took a more serious turn.  The tone of light bantering in which the preceding conversation had taken place had been assumed on his part.  For the last few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon his waking hours.  They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and in hideousness.  Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that every night were groping in the windings of his brain.  It was a well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull, carefully feeling its way through the myriad convolutions where thought resides.

And, oh, the agony of it all!  A human mind is not a thing of stone, but alive, horribly alive to pain.  What was it those fingers sought, what mysterious treasures, what jewels hidden in the under-layer of his consciousness?  His brain was like a human gold-mine, quaking under the blow of the pick and the tread of the miner.  The miner!  Ah, the miner!  Ceaselessly, thoroughly, relentlessly, he opened vein after vein and wrested untold riches from the quivering ground; but each vein was a live vein and each nugget of gold a thought!

No wonder the boy was a nervous wreck.  Whenever a tremulous nascent idea was formulating itself, the dream-hand clutched it and took it away, brutally severing the fine threads that bind thought to thought.  And when the morning came, how his head ached!  It was not an acute pain, but dull, heavy, incessant.