And then I really saw him. Till then the bright glow of the sunset through the windows and the cloudiness of disturbed sleep had made me stare vaguely without seeing anything at all. But the movement out of the chair gave me sight, and as soon as I saw, I was almost dazed again. For he was _different_. Of course, after five years, he was bound to be different, but somehow the difference was different. It wasn't that he looked particularly ill (though he certainly didn't look well); it was just that he had a look in him of somebody else--somebody whom I had never seen before. Perhaps if I had met him then for the first time, I shouldn't have been in the least alarmed; I should have thought it was all perfectly natural--the blue eyes like sharpened swords, the short-cropped hair with its earliest streaks of iron-grey, the pale, lined cheeks, and the shoulders with their hint of a stoop.... Good God! And he was hardly thirty! He looked fifty to me as I saw him that night. He looked a genius, a poet, a madman, an eastern seer--anything and anybody except the Terry I had known. Only his voice and mannerisms were the same. He still spoke with an air of reluctance. He still half-smiled. "Extraordinary," he said, "that you should arrive to-day. Really extraordinary...." "Why?" "Because to-day"--and he suddenly seemed to grow excited--"I can't explain it to you--not in detail.... But it means--almost certainly it means--success in the work I am busy on--success after all these years--after so many disappointments." I congratulated him (though I was still too dazed to do anything with much show of fervour), and then he began a slow cross-examination. How long was I staying? Had Mizzi given me a good room? Was my business likely to occupy all or most of the time? I answered as well as I could, and then, with astonishing calmness, he said: "Don't you think that, in the circumstances, I deserve a holiday?" He went on, before amazement gave me a chance of replying: "Well, I'm going to take one, anyhow. I'm going to take a week--at least a week. And you can combine business with pleasure and come with me. We'll go to Buda by one of the Danube steamers. You wanted to do that trip the last time you were here, didn't you? ... I think the boat leaves about eight to-morrow morning--Mizzi will tell us. And then, after our jaunt, you can go back to London and I can come back here and get to work again."