und it in your bag.
Will you please take it!"

He took it without a word. Perhaps he could not trust himself to speak.

"Now go. Hurry!" she said. "You are not safe yet."

"But you?" I asked.

"You have failed," she replied. "I must go back to him. There is no
other way."

Strangely sick at heart for a man who has just had a miraculous escape
from death, I opened the door. Coatless, disheveled figures, my friend
and I stepped out into the moonlight.

Hideous under the pale rays lay the two dead men, their glazed eyes
upcast to the peace of the blue heavens. Karamaneh had shot to kill,
for both had bullets in their brains. If God ever planned a more
complex nature than hers--a nature more tumultuous with conflicting
passions, I cannot conceive of it. Yet her beauty was of the sweetest;
and in some respects she had the heart of a child--this girl who could
shoot so straight.

"We must send the police to-night," said Smith. "Or the papers--"

"Hurry," came the girl's voice commandingly from the darkness of the
cottage.

It was a singular situation. My very soul rebelled against it. But
what could we do?

"Tell us where we can communicate," began Smith.

"Hurry. I shall be suspected. Do you want him to kill me!"

We moved away. All was very still now, and the lights glimmered
faintly ahead. Not a wisp of cloud brushed the moon's disk.

"Good-night, Karamaneh," I whispered softly.

CHAPTER XVIII

TO pursue further the adventure on the marshes would be a task at once
useless and thankless. In its actual and in its dramatic significance
it concluded with our parting from Karamaneh. And in that parting I
learned what Shakespeare meant by "Sweet Sorrow."

There was a world, I learned, upon the confines of which I stood, a
world whose very existence hitherto had been unsuspected. Not the
least of the mysteries which peeped from the darkness was the mystery
of the heart of Karamaneh. I sought to forget her. I sought to
remember her. Indeed, in the latter task I found one more congenial,
yet, in the direction and extent of the ideas which it engendered, one
that led me to a precipice.

East and West may not intermingle. As a student of world-policies, as
a physician, I admitted, could not deny, that truth. Again, if
Karamaneh were to be credited, she had come to Fu-Manchu a slave; had
fallen into the hands of the raiders; had crossed the desert with the
slave-drivers; had known t