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?"