The room, heavily shuttered, was lit by a hanging lamp of brass, worked into the form of a dragon, which didn't give a very brilliant light, but quite enough to show me my companion clearly when he returned a few minutes later. I had gasped with astonishment earlier in the evening, when I saw him do the Brighteyes act. Now I gasped again. He was the same person, exactly, in externals, even to the sleek celestial grin on his yellow face, and yet there was a palpable change in the whole air of the man. I couldn't lay my finger on the difference, but it was the difference between chalk and cheese. Then even the grin fell away from him, and he smiled, a frank, open smile. 'Well, Mr. Ronald Mirlees!' he said. The words had been spoken in the perfect English of a well-bred man. CHAPTER II FLIGHT I could do nothing but sit back in my seat and gape stupidly, while he continued to look at me with an air of quiet, friendly amusement. 'Well, Mr. Ronald Mirlees,' he repeated, 'we had a close call to-night. But for the extremely sandy way you joined in on my side it would have been closer. Come, let me thank you for saving my life.' I got a sufficient hold on my wits to rise and take the hand he held out to me. 'I think it's I that have to thank you,' I said. 'I'm no invalid, but I don't reckon to be able to sling full-grown men about my head like Indian clubs. As to coming in on your side, it was more than any decent human being could have done to sit tight and watch those blackguards rob you.' 'Had they done so,' he said, gravely, 'it would have interfered with my plans seriously--vitally, Mirlees!' 'But how do you come to know my name?' 'Dear me,' he replied, with a wonderfully winning laugh, 'if such a well-known orientalist as yourself wants to visit that sort of den _incognito_, he must assume a character--like this.' He took the long Chinese robe between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a shake. 'But one moment,' he continued, stepping to the side of the room and drawing a card from a case. 'That's me.' I took the pasteboard slip from his carefully browned hands and read: MR. SAUNDERS PHILIPSON. There was nothing else, not even the Chinese equivalent of our foreign names which we usually print for the benefit of servants and native tradesmen who cannot read English. 'Now,' said Philipson, waving me back to my settee and taking a chair himself. 'We are in an uncommonly nasty hole. That much is self-evident. Two or three of the men I saw on the floor of that den to-night looked as if they were never going to get up again, and the fellow I was obliged to use as a weapon of defence was certain stone dead before I touched him. A melancholy business, no doubt, but I would sooner they than we.'