Phil descended from his rick'sha at the Tokyo Club and paid the coolie.

The building faced an open square between the Imperial Hotel and the Parliament Buildings, along one of the smaller picturesque moats, which the fever for modernization was now filling in to make a conventional boulevard. A motor shed stood at the side of the plaza and an automobile or two was generally in evidence. The structure was small but comfortable enough, with reading- and card-rooms and a billiard-room of many tables. It was the clearing-house for the capital's news, the general exchange for Diet, Peers' Club and the Embassies. It was a place of tacit free-masonry and conversational dissections. From five to seven in the afternoon it was a polyglot babble of Japanese, English, French, German and Italian, punctuated with the tinkle of glasses and the cheerful click of billiard balls. Over its tables secretaries met to gossip of the newest entente or the latest social "affair," and protocols had been drafted on the big, deep, leather sofas adjoining the bar.

The door was opened by a servile bell-boy in buttons. Phil tossed his hat on to the hall-rack and entered. It was cool and pleasant inside, and a great bowl of China asters sat on the table beside the membership book. On the wall was a wire frame full of visitors' cards. He strode through the office and entered a large, glass-inclosed piazza where a number of Japanese, some in foreign, some in native costume, were watching a game of Go. Two younger Legation attachÉs were shaking dice at another table. It was but a little past noon and the place had an air of sober quiet, very different, Phil reflected, from the club on the Yokohama Bund, which was always buzzing, and where he was hail-fellow-well-met with everybody. Frowning, he passed into the next room.

Here his eye lightened. Sitting in a corner of one of the huge sofas which sank under his enormous weight, was Doctor Bersonin. A little round table was before him on which sat a tall glass frosted with cracked ice.

"Sit down," said the expert. "How do you come to be in Tokyo? The Review, I presume." He struck a call-bell on the table and gave an order to the waiter.

Phil lighted a cigarette. "No," he said, "I've come to stay for a while."

"You haven't given up your bungalow on the Bluff?" asked Bersonin quickly. There was an odd eagerness in his colorless face—a look of almost dread, which Phil, lighting his cigarette, did not see. It changed to relief as the other answered:

"No. Probably I shan't be here more than a few days."

The expert settled back in his seat. "You'll not find the hotel everything it should be, I'm afraid," he observed more casually.

"I'm not there," Phil answered. "I—I've got a little Japanese house."

"So! A mÉnage de garÇon, eh?" The big man held up his clinking glass to the light, and under cover of it, his deep-set yellowish eyes darted a keen, detective look at Phil's averted face. "Well," he went on, "how are your affairs? Has the stern brother appeared yet?"

Phil shifted uneasily. "No," he replied. "I expect him pretty soon, though." He drained the glass the boy had filled. "You've been tremendously kind, Doctor," he went on hurriedly, "to lend me so much, without the least bit of security—"

"Pshaw!" said Bersonin. "Why shouldn't I?" He put his hand on the other's shoulder with a friendly gesture. "I only wish money could give me as much pleasure as it does you, my boy."

Two men had seated themselves in the next room. Through the open door came fragments of conversation, the gurgle of poured liquid and the bubbling hiss of Hirano mineral water. Bersonin lowered his voice: "Youth! What a great thing it is! Red-blood and imagination and zest to enjoy. All it needs is the wherewithal to gild its pleasures. After a time age catches us, and what are luxuries then? Only things to make tiresomeness a little less irksome!"

Phil moved his glass on the table top in sullen circles. "But suppose one hasn't the 'wherewithal' you talk of? What's the fun without money, even when you're young? I've never been able to discover it!"

"Find the money," said Bersonin.

"I wish some one would tell me how!"

Bersonin's head turned toward the door. He sat suddenly rigid. It came to Phil that he was listening intently to the talk between the two men in the next room.

"I needn't point out"—it was a measured voice, cold and incisive and deliberate—"that when the American fleet came, two years ago, conditions were quite different. The cruise was a national tour de force; the visit to Japan was incidental. Besides, there was really no feeling then between the two nations—that was all a creation of the yellow press. But the coming of this European Squadron to-day is a different thing. It is a season of general sensitiveness and distrust, and when the ships belong to a nation between which and Japan there is real and serious diplomatic tension—well, in my opinion the time is, at best, inopportune."

"Perhaps"—a younger voice was speaking now, less certain, less poised and a little hesitant—"perhaps the very danger makes for caution. People are particularly careful with matches when there's a lot of powder about."

"True, so far as intention goes. But there is the possibility of some contre-temps. You remember the case of the Ajax in the Eighties. It was blown up in a friendly harbor—clearly enough by accident, at least so far as the other nation was concerned. But it was during a time of strain and hot blood, and you know how narrowly a great clash was averted. If war had followed, regiments would have marched across the frontier, shouting: 'Remember the Ajax!' As it was, there was a panic in three bourses. Solid securities fell to the lowest point in their history. The yellow press pounded down the market, and a few speculators on the short side made gigantic fortunes."

A moment's pause ensued. Bersonin's fingers were rigid. There seemed suddenly to Phil to be some significance between his silence and the conversation—as if he wished it to sink into his, Phil's, mind. The voice continued:

"What has happened once may happen again. What if one of those Dreadnaughts by whatever accident should go down in this friendly harbor? It doesn't take a vivid imagination to picture the headlines next morning in the newspapers at home!"

The ice in the tumblers clinked; there was a sound of pushed-back chairs.

As their departing footsteps died in the hall, Bersonin's gaze lifted slowly to Phil's face. It had in it now the look it had held when he gazed from the roof of the bungalow on the Bluff across the anchorage beneath. Phil did not start or shrink. Instead, the slinking evil that ruled him met half-way the bolder evil in that glance, from whose sinister suggestion the veil was for a moment lifted, recognizing a tacit kinship. Neither spoke, but as the hard young eyes looked into the cavernous, topaz eyes of Doctor Bersonin, Phil knew that the thought that lay coiled there was a thing unholy and unafraid. His heart beat faster, but it warmed. He felt no longer awed by the other's greater age, standing and accomplishments. He was conscious of a new, half-insolent sense of easy comradeship.

"Suppose," said Bersonin slowly, "I should show you how to find the money."

A sharp eagerness darted across Phil's face. Money! How much he needed it, longed for it! It could put him on his feet, clear off his debts, square his bridge-balance, and—his brother notwithstanding!—enable him to begin another chapter of the careless life he loved! He looked steadily into the expert's face.

"Tell me!" he almost whispered.

Bersonin rose and held out his hand. He did not smile.

"Come with me to-night," he said. "I dine late, but we'll take a spin in my car and have some tea somewhere beforehand. Tell me where your house is and I'll send Ishida with the motor-car for you."

Phil gave him the address and he went out with no further word. A great, brass-fitted automobile, with a young, keen-eyed Japanese sitting beside the chauffeur, throbbed up from the shed. Bersonin climbed ponderously in. A gray-haired diplomatist, entering the Club with a stranger, pointed the big man out to the other as he was whirled away.