world, may be threatened anew at any moment!"

He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner I
knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man composed of
the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical frock.

"He may have got back to China, Doctor!" he cried, and his eyes had the
fighting glint in them. "Could you rest in peace if you thought that he
lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a night-call
took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years since he was
here among us, since we were searching every shadow for those awful
green eyes! What became of his band of assassins--his stranglers, his
dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and what-not--the army of
creatures--"

He paused, taking a drink.

"You--" he hesitated diffidently--"searched in Egypt with Nayland Smith,
did you not?"

I nodded.

"Contradict me if I am wrong," he continued; "but my impression is that
you were searching for the girl--the girl--Karamaneh, I think she was
called?"

"Yes," I replied shortly; "but we could find no trace--no trace."

"You--er--were interested?"

"More than I knew," I replied, "until I realized that I had--lost her."

"I never met Karamaneh, but from your account, and from others, she was
quite unusually--"

"She was very beautiful," I said, and stood up, for I was anxious to
terminate that phase of the conversation.

Eltham regarded me sympathetically; he knew something of my search with
Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed, Eastern girl who had brought romance
into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her as I
loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese doctor who
had been her master.

Eltham began to pace up and down the rug, his pipe bubbling furiously;
and something in the way he carried his head reminded me momentarily of
Nayland Smith. Certainly, between this pink-faced clergyman, with his
deceptively mild appearance, and the gaunt, bronzed, and steely-eyed
Burmese commissioner, there was externally little in common; but it was
some little nervous trick in his carriage that conjured up through the
smoky haze one distant summer evening when Smith had paced that very
room as Eltham paced it now, when before my startled eyes he had rung up
the curtain upon the savage drama in which, though I little suspected it
then, Fate had cast me for a leading role.

I wondered if Eltham's thoughts ran par