There comes always, soon after the meeting of long-absent friends, a sudden hiatus when the first rapture of reunion is over and the quiet joy of companionship has hardly yet resumed its sway. At such a moment one says anything--_anything_--to break the awkward and intolerable silence. I, for example, when that moment came, made some remark about the comfort of his surroundings. "Better than Swinton Street, eh? ... And even a girl who speaks English--of a sort." And he said: "Oh, yes, that's Mizzi." (He pronounced it "Mitzi.") Then we began to talk about his work, and that finally bridged the hiatus. He said that he had plenty to do; and that he was working hard. I asked him if he were doing more than he could have done in London, and he said that he thought so. Then I asked him how he liked Karelsky, and he replied cautiously that he thought he was very clever.... He seemed even more than usually reticent, and when I hinted that I would like to be taken over Karelsky's laboratories, he told me that it wouldn't be possible. They were secret, apparently, and he had had to sign a paper that he wouldn't divulge anything of what went on in them. "Anybody would think you were inventing submarines, not serums!" I said laughingly and there the matter ended. X I hadn't seen him for two years. That fact, so simple and so obvious, was yet the hardest of all to realize. I kept on being startled by the revelation of what it meant; it gave me almost a shock, for instance, when I first heard him talking in fluent colloquial German. Those two years ... how _had_ he managed to live them through? What had they meant to him? I should never have known but for Mizzi. Mizzi, I soon found, was a person of great intelligence and even greater industry. It was she who practically ran the apartment-house (her mother being a semi-invalid), and it was under her energetic management that the general tone of the establishment was being constantly improved. She rose at six in the morning and worked till about midnight, and she had sent to her every week from Chicago an immense portfolio of a magazine called _Hotel-Keeping_. In appearance she might have been called good-looking had not that elusive thing, personality, made you forget her looks altogether. She was, as a matter of fact, rather an odd mixture of Latin and Teutonic physical attributes; her broad and essentially German forehead was balanced by dark eyes that might have been Spanish or Italian. But it was her personality that counted. She could bring you a cup of coffee and somehow, by the slightest of gestures, convey the fact that she was not a servant, but rather a hostess honouring her guests.