She began to haul the cord into the window, and, looking upward, I perceived that it was looped in some way over the telegraph cables which crossed the street at that point.  It was a slender cord, and it appeared to be passed across a joint in the cables almost immediately above the center of the roadway.  As it was hauled in, a second and stronger line attached to it was pulled, in turn, over the cables, and thence in by the window.  Karamaneh twisted a length of it around a metal bracket fastened in the wall, and placed a light wooden crossbar in my hand.

“Make sure that there is no one in the street,” she said, craning out and looking to right and left, “then swing across.  The length of the rope is just sufficient to enable you to swing through the open window opposite, and there is a mattress inside to drop upon.  But release the bar immediately, or you may be dragged back.  The door of the room in which you will find yourself is unlocked, and you have only to walk down the stairs and out into the street.”

I peered at the crossbar in my hand, then looked hard at the girl beside me.  I missed something of the old fire of her nature; she was very subdued, tonight.

“Thank you, Karamaneh,” I said, softly.

She suppressed a little cry as I spoke her name, and drew back into the shadows.

“I believe you are my friend,” I said, “but I cannot understand.  Won’t you help me to understand?”

I took her unresisting hand, and drew her toward me.  My very soul seemed to thrill at the contact of her lithe body . . .

She was trembling wildly and seemed to be trying to speak, but although her lips framed the words no sound followed.  Suddenly comprehension came to me.  I looked down into the street, hitherto deserted . . . and into the upturned face of Fu-Manchu.

Wearing a heavy fur-collared coat, and with his yellow, malignant countenance grotesquely horrible beneath the shade of a large tweed motor cap, he stood motionless, looking up at me.  That he had seen me, I could not doubt; but had he seen my companion?

In a choking whisper Karamaneh answered my unspoken question.

“He has not seen me!  I have done much for you; do in return a small thing for me.  Save my life!”

She dragged me back from the window and fled across the room to the weird laboratory where I had lain captive.  Throwing herself upon the divan, she held out her white wrists and glanced significantly at the manacles.

“Lock them upon me!” she said, rapidly.  “Quick! quick!”

Great as was my mental disturbance, I managed to grasp the purpose of this device.  The very extremity of my danger found me cool.  I fastened the manacles, which so recently had confined my own wrists, upon the slim wrists of Karamaneh.  A faint and muffled disturbance, doubly ominous because there was nothing to proclaim its nature, reached me from some place below, on the ground floor.