ramaneh snatched off the veil, and with it
the ugly black hat. The cloud of wonderful intractable hair came
rumpling about her face, and her glorious eyes blazed out upon me. How
beautiful they were, with the dark beauty of an Egyptian night; how
often had they looked into mine in dreams!

To labour against a ceaseless yearning for a woman whom one knows, upon
evidence that none but a fool might reject, to be worthless--evil; is
there any torture to which the soul of man is subject, more pitiless?
Yet this was my lot, for what past sins assigned to me I was unable to
conjecture; and this was the woman, this lovely slave of a monster, this
creature of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

"I suppose you will declare that you do not know me!" I said harshly.

Her lips trembled, but she made no reply.

"It is very convenient to forget, sometimes," I ran on bitterly, then
checked myself, for I knew that my words were prompted by a feckless
desire to hear her defence, by a fool's hope that it might be an
acceptable one. I looked again at the net contrivance in my hand; it
had a strong spring fitted to it and a line attached. Quite obviously
it was intended for snaring. "What were you about to do?" I demanded
sharply; but in my heart, poor fool that I was, I found admiration for
the exquisite arch of Karamaneh's lips, and reproach because they were
so tremulous.

She spoke then.

"Dr. Petrie--"

"Well?"

"You seem to be--angry with me, not so much because--of what I do, as
because I do not remember you. Yet--"

"Kindly do not revert to the matter," I interrupted. "You have chosen,
very conveniently, to forget that once we were friends. Please
yourself; but answer my question."

She clasped her hands with a sort of wild abandon.

"Why do you treat me so?" she cried. She had the most fascinating
accent imaginable. "Throw me into prison, kill me if you like for what
I have done!" She stamped her foot. "For what I have done! But do not
torture me, try to drive me mad with your reproaches--that I forget
you! I tell you--again I tell you--that until you came one night, last
week, to rescue some one from"--(there was the old trick of hesitating
before the name of Fu-Manchu)--"from _him_, I had never, never seen
you!"

The dark eyes looked into mine, afire with a positive hunger for
belief--or so I was sorely tempted to suppose. But the facts were
against her.

"Such a declaration is worthless," I said, as coldly as I could. "You
are a