Those few remaining hours in Buda-Pesth stay in my memory with nightmarish vividness. The heat--the dust--the smells of cooking; _Blattae Orientales_ playing hide-and-seek on the floor; porters sweating and straining under loads of luggage; the Vienna train at the platform like a row of sweltering ovens, reeking with paprika and human bodies and half-molten varnish. Shade temperature in the station--thirty-four Centigrade.... And over and around the torture of it was the tragic atmosphere of illusion--Terry thinking all the time that he had really convinced and converted Severn, and Severn, on his side, having no suspicion of the Terry-Helen episode. Their crumpled heat-soaked unawareness was an infinitely pathetic thing. Only Severn was cheerful. He talked to us endlessly, and without getting much in the way of answers, for even to open one's mouth to speak a single word was to cause an extra bead of perspiration to trickle disagreeably down one's forehead. But Severn seemed not to care, and when we reached Vienna, with a few hours' interval before the departure of the Paris express from another station, it was perhaps inevitable that he should take command. He knew Vienna well (what city _didn't_ he know well?) and I rather wished he were staying on with us. Even the night was almost unbearably warm, and with sure instinct he led us to the cool Rathaus-Keller and ordered iced drinks. Terry spoke hardly at all, and neither did I; the ordeal of the train-journey had been too much for us. But Severn, of all the men I ever met, was the most impervious to physical surroundings; neither heat, nor train-journeys, nor even all-night sittings at the House could disturb that marvellous equanimity. He seemed, indeed, as he sat there in the Rathaus-Keller with his tankard of lager before him, a lithe and entrancingly-mannered boy; and even the stories he told of his life in Vienna twenty years before did not take away from him that extraordinary air of youthfulness. He had spent a year in the city, he said, picking up the language and having a good time. He had _lived_, and his eyes, seeing again the old familiar scenes, shone with it. This Rathaus-Keller--what times he had had there! ... And then on the wall he caught sight of an advertisement of a variety-show at Ronacher's, and it reminded him of the old Ronacher's, where he had seen Rannin, the Cingalese with the Iron Skin, who had climbed a ladder of sword-blades barefoot, and the Chevalier Cliquot, whose pastime had been to swallow twenty-two-inch cavalry sabres, and the Human Ostrich, and Madame Elise, the Parisian Strong Lady, and the rest of them.... Ah, those old days! ...