She shrugged her pretty little shoulders and laughed outright. "How can I tell?--Perhaps in ten days--or ten months--or ten years. But it will happen--it is bound to happen--_some day_...." The pages of my diary about this time bear witness to the number of times Terry and I dined at the End House. Generally we went on Wednesdays, and as time passed the "generally" became "always" and the dinners a habit. Once Helen was slightly unwell during one of Terry's Wednesday lectures, and he broke his fixed rule so far as to see her afterwards and escort her home in her car. And then, the following Wednesday, although she wasn't unwell at all, he repeated the courtesy, and that also became a habit. They were always very jolly, informal affairs, those dinners. More often than not, Severn wasn't there; he was busy at his chambers, or dining at one of his clubs, or on duty in the House. Sometimes, by way of compensation, June, aged eleven, was home from her boarding-school, and Terry used often to amuse her by performing small chemical and physical experiments. I can remember him fixing a Bunsen burner on to the kitchen gas-stove, and to cook's amazement as well as June's, blowing a piece of glass tubing into various shapes. On another occasion he solemnly changed the colour of litmus-paper before our eyes.... He seemed very fond of the child, and she, I believe, thought he was some sort of magician. All this happened while spring was deepening into summer. Even in my own most unsalubrious district of Camden Town the change of season was unmistakable; nay, even also in Gower Street, and even at the top of the Physics Building and along the corridor where the name "Dr. M. Terrington" rewarded the ardent bacteriological pilgrim after his six flights of labour. But the chief sign of change along that corridor was the fact that sometimes, and more often as the season progressed, the pilgrim knocked at the door, looked inside, and found the room empty. VIII He let go his work. It all happened so suddenly--as if some barrier inside him had collapsed. And also, to make the problem of analysis more difficult for me, it happened when I was away. I was only away a week, but a week was long enough to change everything; and when I came back, everything _was_ changed. He would tell me hardly anything, except that he felt he had been working too hard and needed a rest. (And that, of course, was plausible enough.) He also, in an unguarded moment, admitted to a certain spiritual change. "It was what Severn said--that night we went to dinner and we all argued about civilizations and progress and morality and what not--do you remember? Somehow it made me think of things I'd never thought of before.... In a sense, I was blind till then."