"Meester Terrington," she told me, as on that first evening she unlocked the front-door to let me out, "iss always at work. Too hard, I think.... You must tell him not to be so hard at work. He wished to go to work even with hiss temperature, but I call the doctor, and he said not. He not let him go even this morning to the station to meet you." I said that I thought both she and the doctor had acted very rightly, and she went on, aloofly accepting my approval: "_I_ would have come to meet you, but I did not know how you looked." That was our first conversation. We had many others afterwards, and it was from them that I began to have an idea of what had been happening to Terry during those two years. The _leit-motif_ of it all had been Work. He had been working day after day for two years, and except on Sunday afternoons he had taken no holidays and had allowed himself no respite. "I tell him always to go to the Semmering, but he will not, because it iss necessary to go for the whole day." His hours in the laboratories were quite long enough in themselves, but he supplemented them by extra hours of work in his own room at night. He never went to theatre or concert or opera; he might have been exiled in a backwoods village, instead of in the gayest city in Europe. "He says to me that he likes not music," she said. But she thought there might also be another reason--that he hadn't enough money. "Karelsky," she said, "iss a very rich man, but he does not pay much to anybody else. There iss a doctor here who knows him." I said that I didn't know that Karelsky was rich, and she answered: "He gets the money from America--where all the money comes from." She told me also that Terry had made no friends. "He says to me that he hass no father or mother or fiancée, and I am sorry for that. He also says that he hass no friend except you, but I think that iss his own fault, for there are many very nice people in Wien.... But he will not make friends. I think he likes nothing except hiss work. That iss why I give him the big room at the top of the new house, so that the others, if they come in a little drunken, shall not derange him." I said to her: "Well, anyhow, he's not going to work so hard while I'm here. And next Sunday, whether he wants or not, he's coming with me to that place you mentioned--what was it?" "The Semmering," she replied. "It hass wonderful mountains, but--do not forget--it iss necessary to haf the whole day. And he will say to you what he says always to me--that he cannot go because he must feed hiss mice at eleven o'clock.... Every Sunday at eleven o'clock he goes to feed hiss mice! What would you do to him?" There was a touch of indignation in her voice. XI