"Good God!" cried Todd, reaching him at a bound. "The man is in convulsions. A doctor, quick, or he'll die here!" Ronsard pressed a bell in frantic haste, and sent all the Legation servants forth in search of physicians, warning each to go in an individual direction. As a natural consequence, they went in a frightened phalanx. Police-officers, seeing the confusion, hurried in. Everywhere was dismay and disorganization. Todd alone retained a little judgment, giving the sick man ammonia to smell, and bathing his forehead with cold water. It was a young American practitioner who first gained the house. Had it been a German (of whom there are several of world-wide reputation resident in Tokio), he, in behalf of his reputation,--not to mention common sense, would certainly have insisted upon sending the invalid back to Yokohama, where, indubitably, he belonged. The American being younger, more imaginative, and with less reputation to jeopardize, might lend himself the more readily to the unusual. Ronsard and Todd, each in his own way,--both, of course, intensely desirous of getting Pierre safely in hospital walls,--nevertheless advanced persuasions to keep him away from the desirable haven until the following morning. The physician was evidently puzzled by the presence of conflicting motives. As a final statement of his own position, he said, "I insist that you gentlemen recognize the measures I must employ to give him an interval of strength and lucidity must take away at least fifty per cent of the patient's chances of recovery!" Todd answered for both. "We understand. It is the dickens of a thing for us to have to decide on; yet, since the man, if in his senses, would consider us traitors to shut him up before eight to-night, I don't see anything else but to let you dose him until that time." "Exactly," corroborated the French minister. "And, doctor," added Todd, in a slightly embarrassed tone, "it is a mess. We can't explain. Mum's the word, you know." "Oh, I knew before you told me," said the young doctor. Then he went to work. An hour later Pierre, gasping, and pouring out from his entire frame the very sap of vitality, still lay on the sofa, his fever gone, his mind clear, uplifted, pellucid, as it had been on awakening in Yuki's tea-rooms three hours before. The doctor had departed. Neither Todd nor the French minister had left the room. The two politicians tacitly understood that neither trusted the other, yet, strange to say, neither resented it. The issue at stake was too big for personal irritation. In the reaction of his excitement Todd pondered anew, with ever deepening foreboding, upon the thing that Yuki's eyes had told him. Ronsard, overflowing in his cushioned chair, brooded of France and her already humiliated ally, Russia.