Paul stood hesitatingly. He did not quite know what to do. The girl called to him over her shoulder. "Sit down, will you," she said, "anywhere." He walked over to a couch by the window and sat down, looking out over the gay garden to the Downs. Hollyhocks marched as an army with banners in a bed beneath the window. Chanctonbury's crown, clear and bright in the sunlight to-day, rose into the pale blue sky above. "What a glorious window-seat," he said, with a little note of content in his voice. She threw him a glance, but did not speak. She was searching through the portfolio. "I think," observed Paul meditatively, "I'm the luckiest man alive to get a chance of a year here." "Yes?" "I can't make up my mind what to do, you see," he said. "I should have thought there was absolutely no doubt." "No?" queried Paul in genuine astonishment. "Of course not. You've got to write great poetry." "I've also got to live," said Paul, with a flicker of a smile. "Naturally. What about it?" "Well, I've got to earn money." Ursula found what she was looking for. "Here it is," she said, coming over to him. And then, carrying on the conversation: "I think those of us who can see and express things, ought to think first of that," she said. "After all, one lives somehow." But Paul hardly heard. He was staring at the little picture, and was very silent. She broke the silence. "Well, can you guess the poem?" she demanded. "'Spent,'" he whispered, half to himself. Her silence told him he was correct. It was the short thing, since then slightly renamed and improved, that Tressor had, of all he had written, praised superlatively. Of all he had written, but, as he looked at this, astonishment welled up in him. "But this is not what I wrote," he said. It was a picture of dull-red angry sunset tones over a bare stony plain and a dimly-outlined ragged track. A solitary figure of a man lay there, just as he had stumbled forward and fallen at the last step. The light glowed on his sunburnt nude back, his face in shadow; and on one other object, for, some short way beyond him, was a dimly-seen ruined shrine, with the statue of a god, half overthrown. The stone effigy reeled insecurely against a broken pillar, and the glow of the dying sun caught on its upcast face. The girl had copied some Greek masterpiece, and there, in that lone waste, as if to mock the beaten human figure, a regular, perfect, immobile brow and eyes and nose and lips turned upwards to the sky. In the fallen man was life, beaten and despairing, but life; in the fallen god was death, serene and lovely, but death. "This is not what I wrote," repeated Paul again. "But you instantly named it." "It alone, of the pieces in the book, fitted at all," he said. "I suspect that was not all. I should not be in the least surprised if you had more in your mind than you knew. Anyway, your spent day struck me so."