And then there came a long silence, a silence full of small sounds and murmurs--the creak of a floorboard somewhere, the scutter of a beetle, the distant--the very distant--shouting of late revellers. I was certain--_certain_ that the man was Severn, and that what Terry had said was all perfectly true; yet the certainty was outweighed in my mind by the far more momentous revelation that Terry was ill, and that his staring eyes and the hard drive of his breathing could only point in one ominous direction. He was, as Mizzi had said, on the verge of a breakdown. What he wanted was rest and sleep and freedom from work and worry, and he wasn't getting any of it. What an irony that we had come to Buda-Pesth for a holiday! ... He _must_ sleep anyway.... I took him by the arm and said, as firmly and calmly as I could: "Look here, Terry, there's nothing to be gained by arguing this out at one o'clock in the morning. We don't actually know for certain that the man is Severn, and even if we did we could do nothing. So go to bed and try to sleep, and then in the morning maybe----" But he shook himself free and walked across the room to the window. "Moonlight," he muttered; pulling aside the paper blind. He stared hard for a moment at the pavements below, and then, swinging round suddenly, exclaimed: "You say that if we _did_ know for certain, we could do nothing?" "Nothing at all, I assure you, and that's why it's all the more important that we shouldn't discuss it at this hour. So come now...." Again I led him towards the door, and this time, without further protest, he allowed me to pilot him along the corridor to the door of his own room. He was muttering to himself, as I bade him good-night: "Do nothing.... That's what you say ... just nothing ... nothing at all...." XI I oughtn't to have left him. I can see now that I oughtn't, but I had an idea then that if he were left alone he would go to sleep. Not, of course, immediately; I didn't do that myself. I lay awake, I think, for two hours or more, smoking cigarette after cigarette and pondering. But it wasn't Severn who occupied the centre of the stage. Perhaps it was odd that his personal affairs stirred me so little; but then, I had always felt that he was incalculable. There was hardly a thing in the world, good or bad, that I would ever have swore that he wouldn't or couldn't do. I don't mean to assert that I wasn't surprised to find him running off with another woman; I _was_ surprised, but, if you know what I mean, I wasn't surprised to be surprised.