dded; "I think I may venture out alone on
this occasion without personal danger."

Nayland Smith went upstairs to dress, leaving me seated at my writing
table, deep in thought. My notes upon the renewed activity of Dr.
Fu-Manchu were stacked at my left hand, and, opening a new writing
block, I commenced to add to them particulars of this surprising event
in Rangoon which properly marked the opening of the Chinaman's second
campaign. Smith looked in at the door on his way out, but seeing me thus
engaged, did not disturb me.

I think I have made it sufficiently evident in these records that my
practice was not an extensive one, and my hour for receiving patients
arrived and passed with only two professional interruptions.

My task concluded, I glanced at the clock, and determined to devote the
remainder of the evening to a little private investigation of my own.
From Nayland Smith I had preserved the matter a secret, largely because
I feared his ridicule; but I had by no means forgotten that I had seen,
or had strongly imagined that I had seen, Karamaneh--that beautiful
anomaly, who (in modern London) asserted herself to be a slave--in the
shop of an antique dealer not a hundred yards from the British Museum!

A theory was forming in my brain, which I was burningly anxious to put
to the test. I remembered how, two years before, I had met Karamaneh
near to this same spot; and I had heard Inspector Weymouth assert
positively that Fu-Manchu's headquarters were no longer in the East
End, as of yore. There seemed to me to be a distinct probability that a
suitable center had been established for his reception in this place, so
much less likely to be suspected by the authorities. Perhaps I attached
too great a value to what may have been a delusion; perhaps my theory
rested upon no more solid foundation than the belief that I had seen
Karamaneh in the shop of the curio dealer. If her appearance there
should prove to have been phantasmal, the structure of my theory would
be shattered at its base. To-night I should test my premises, and upon
the result of my investigations determine my future action.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE SILVER BUDDHA

Museum Street certainly did not seem a likely spot for Dr. Fu-Manchu to
establish himself, yet, unless my imagination had strangely deceived me,
from the window of the antique dealer who traded under the name of J.
Salaman, those wonderful eyes of Karamaneh like the velvet midnight of
the O