Probably I was glaring madly, and possibly I attracted the notice of the passers-by; but of this I cannot be certain, for all my attention was centered upon that phantasmal face, with the cloudy hair, slightly parted red lips, and the brilliant dark eyes which looked into mine out of the shadows of the shop.

It was bewildering—­it was uncanny; for, delusion or verity, the glamour prevailed.  I exerted a great mental effort, stepped to the door, turned the handle, and entered the shop with as great a show of composure as I could muster.

A curtain draped in a little door at the back of one counter swayed slightly, with no greater violence than may have been occasioned by the draught.  But I fixed my eyes upon this swaying curtain almost fiercely . . . as an impassive half-caste of some kind who appeared to be a strange cross between a Graeco-Hebrew and a Japanese, entered and quite unemotionally faced me, with a slight bow.

So wholly unexpected was this apparition that I started back.

“Can I show you anything, sir?” inquired the new arrival, with a second slight inclination of the head.

I looked at him for a moment in silence.  Then: 

“I thought I saw a lady of my acquaintance here a moment ago,” I said.  “Was I mistaken?”

“Quite mistaken, sir,” replied the shopman, raising his black eyebrows ever so slightly; “a mistake possibly due to a reflection in the window.  Will you take a look around now that you are here?”

“Thank you,” I replied, staring him hard in the face; “at some other time.”

I turned and quitted the shop abruptly.  Either I was mad, or Karamaneh was concealed somewhere therein.

However, realizing my helplessness in the matter, I contented myself with making a mental note of the name which appeared above the establishment—­J.  Salaman—­and walked on, my mind in a chaotic condition and my heart beating with unusual rapidity.

CHAPTER XVI

THE QUESTING HANDS

Within my view, from the corner of the room where I sat in deepest shadow, through the partly opened window (it was screwed, like our own) were rows of glass-houses gleaming in the moonlight, and, beyond them, orderly ranks of flower-beds extending into a blue haze of distance.  By reason of the moon’s position, no light entered the room, but my eyes, from long watching, were grown familiar with the darkness, and I could see Burke quite clearly as he lay in the bed between my post and the window.  I seemed to be back again in those days of the troubled past when first Nayland Smith and I had come to grips with the servants of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  A more peaceful scene than this flower-planted corner of Essex it would be difficult to imagine; but, either because of my knowledge that its peace was chimerical, or because of that outflung consciousness of danger which, actually, or in my imagination, preceded the coming of the Chinaman’s agents, to my seeming the silence throbbed electrically and the night was laden with stilly omens.