And meanwhile I, who, thank heaven, am not attempting to present a history of myself, lived on in London, still exiled from the End House, and still seeking a precarious livelihood in the Street of Peradventure. I lunched with Severn at White's from time to time, and I worked hard, so that the months passed quickly; and then, just when I was about to plan my yearly holidays in Vienna, Severn got me a _Messenger_: commission that sent me roving round Honolulu and the South Seas instead. And so, without seeing Terry, as I had intended, there came another crowded year of work. That was the year, you may remember, in which Karelsky burst upon the world with his astonishing Longevity Theory. In a slack season it descended upon Fleet Street like manna from heaven. Karelsky in the course of a lecture at the Sorbonne, announced the discovery of what he called "a new method of revitalizing life-force," and to this he added the startling assertion that, having experimented with it upon himself, he had every hope of beating the famous record of Methusaleh. Naturally the newspapers went wild about it, and so did joke-manufacturers and music-hall comedians all over the world. For a few months Karelsky was almost a household word. Then after a Brixton gentleman had cut his wife into six small pieces, it was generally recognized in Fleet Street that the Karelsky-Methusaleh episode was finished.... I remember asking Terry in a letter what he thought about it all, and receiving a non-committal reply that he couldn't express any opinion because his own work hadn't brought him into any contact with it. Karelsky, I gathered, was a man of many-sided activities. Severn was more outspoken. "Whether it's all rot or not," he said, "you must admit that Karelsky's played the game rather well. You newspaper-men ought to pass him a vote of thanks. He's saved you from having to rake up the Sea-serpent, anyhow." But all that is really by the bye. The newspapers of the time are full of the Methusaleh business, just as they are of Severn's speeches in the House, and anybody deeply interested in either can search the files and read till he is tired. VIII I went to Vienna in the summer of that second year. Terry had sent me a most cordial letter of welcome; I had engaged through Cook's a room at the Bristol; I had amassed a fair sum of money after a profitable year, and I was prepared to spend as much as need be on a deserved holiday. I chose the middle weeks of July, and it was gloriously sunny on the morning I arrived at Vienna. All the way from London I had been looking forward to that moment, for I felt confident that Terry would be on the platform to meet me. Yet he wasn't. I loitered for a while about the station precincts, thinking he might have been delayed on the way; and then, when he still didn't come, I took a cab to the address in the Laudon Gasse where he lodged.