What mattered most was Terry's health. His great need was for rest and tranquillity of mind, and it was very evident that neither was to be obtained in Buda-Pesth. We must leave it, therefore; and I fell asleep with that decision firmly fixed in my mind. I think I must have slept heavily, for I remember nothing till I opened my eyes to see Terry in my room again, still fully dressed. It was past dawn, for the window, as he pulled the blind away from it, threw a ghostly spotlight over his head and shoulders. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't intend to wake you." I stammered some sort of enquiry, and he answered: "I only came in to see if you _were_ awake. You left your door unlocked.... Shall we go downstairs and have breakfast?" "What time is it?" "Past six." "Isn't that too early?" "Not in this country." "All right, then." I agreed the more readily because it began to occur to me that the earlier the breakfast the less the chance of meeting Severn. He told me while I washed and dressed that he hadn't been able to sleep a wink, and that the only interesting things had been a couple of cockroaches on his window-ledge. He said, with what was to me the most horrible casualness: "I lifted one chap up to have a look at him. He was much bigger than the English or even the Viennese kind, and had lots more joints in his antennæ. It was odd to see him squirming all over my hand in search of his mate...." He was very pale, but also very calm. XII Half-an-hour later we were breakfasting and discussing, not my decision, but his. That's the way things usually happened. To waiters and cabmen and hotel-porters he always gave a wonderful display of submission to my wishes, but the larger affairs of life he decided for himself. Nor was there ever much hope of persuading him when once he had made up his mind. He told me once that I argued too cleverly; and that he always mistrusted cleverness in argument. But that breakfast discussion didn't give me even the chance of being clever. He began by telling me, with a terrible sort of earnestness, that he had been thinking all night about Severn. (In the same tone and with the same look might a Methodist preacher have said that he had been wrestling all night with God.) "And--it seems to me--that to say--to be content to say--that we can do _nothing_--is cowardly. We _must_ do _something_--we must _help_--if we can." "Certainly, if we _can_. But how can _we_?" That also he had pondered over. "First of all," he said, with a slow earnestness that went over me like a steam-roller, "we must have a talk with Severn."