ck me as being likely to prove instructive, and
I was about to call the shopman when I was startled to feel a hand
clutch my arm.

I turned around rapidly--and was looking into the darkly beautiful eyes
of Karamaneh! She--whom I had seen in so many guises--was dressed in a
perfectly fitting walking habit, and had much of her wonderful hair
concealed beneath a fashionable hat.

She glanced about her apprehensively.

"Quick! Come round the corner. I must speak to you," she said, her
musical voice thrilling with excitement.

I never was quite master of myself in her presence. He must have been
a man of ice who could have been, I think, for her beauty had all the
bouquet of rarity; she was a mystery--and mystery adds charm to a
woman. Probably she should have been under arrest, but I know I would
have risked much to save her from it.

As we turned into a quiet thoroughfare she stopped and said:

"I am in distress. You have often asked me to enable you to capture
Dr. Fu-Manchu. I am prepared to do so."

I could scarcely believe that I heard right.

"Your brother--" I began.

She seized my arm entreatingly, looking into my eyes.

"You are a doctor," she said. "I want you to come and see him now."

"What! Is he in London?"

"He is at the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu."

"And you would have me--"

"Accompany me there, yes."

Nayland Smith, I doubted not, would have counseled me against trusting
my life in the hands of this girl with the pleading eyes. Yet I did
so, and with little hesitation; shortly we were traveling eastward in a
closed cab. Karamaneh was very silent, but always when I turned to her
I found her big eyes fixed upon me with an expression in which there
was pleading, in which there was sorrow, in which there was something
else--something indefinable, yet strangely disturbing. The cabman she
had directed to drive to the lower end of the Commercial Road, the
neighborhood of the new docks, and the scene of one of our early
adventures with Dr. Fu-Manchu. The mantle of dusk had closed about the
squalid activity of the East End streets as we neared our destination.
Aliens of every shade of color were about us now, emerging from
burrow-like alleys into the glare of the lamps upon the main road. In
the short space of the drive we had passed from the bright world of the
West into the dubious underworld of the East.

I do not know that Karamaneh moved; but in sympathy, as we neared the
abode of t