I turned around rapidly—­and was looking into the darkly beautiful eyes of Karamaneh!  She—­whom I had seen in so many guises—­ was dressed in a perfectly fitting walking habit, and had much of her wonderful hair concealed beneath a fashionable hat.

She glanced about her apprehensively.

“Quick!  Come round the corner.  I must speak to you,” she said, her musical voice thrilling with excitement.

I never was quite master of myself in her presence.  He must have been a man of ice who could have been, I think, for her beauty had all the bouquet of rarity; she was a mystery—­and mystery adds charm to a woman.  Probably she should have been under arrest, but I know I would have risked much to save her from it.

As we turned into a quiet thoroughfare she stopped and said: 

“I am in distress.  You have often asked me to enable you to capture Dr. Fu-Manchu.  I am prepared to do so.”

I could scarcely believe that I heard right.

“Your brother—­” I began.

She seized my arm entreatingly, looking into my eyes.

“You are a doctor,” she said.  “I want you to come and see him now.”

“What!  Is he in London?”

“He is at the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu.”

“And you would have me—­”

“Accompany me there, yes.”

Nayland Smith, I doubted not, would have counseled me against trusting my life in the hands of this girl with the pleading eyes.  Yet I did so, and with little hesitation; shortly we were traveling eastward in a closed cab.  Karamaneh was very silent, but always when I turned to her I found her big eyes fixed upon me with an expression in which there was pleading, in which there was sorrow, in which there was something else—­something indefinable, yet strangely disturbing.  The cabman she had directed to drive to the lower end of the Commercial Road, the neighborhood of the new docks, and the scene of one of our early adventures with Dr. Fu-Manchu.  The mantle of dusk had closed about the squalid activity of the East End streets as we neared our destination.  Aliens of every shade of color were about us now, emerging from burrow-like alleys into the glare of the lamps upon the main road.  In the short space of the drive we had passed from the bright world of the West into the dubious underworld of the East.

I do not know that Karamaneh moved; but in sympathy, as we neared the abode of the sinister Chinaman, she crept nearer to me, and when the cab was discharged, and together we walked down a narrow turning leading riverward, she clung to me fearfully, hesitated, and even seemed upon the point of turning back.  But, overcoming her fear or repugnance, she led on, through a maze of alleyways and courts, wherein I hopelessly lost my bearings, so that it came home to me how wholly I was in the hands of this girl whose history was so full of shadows, whose real character was so inscrutable, whose beauty, whose charm truly might mask the cunning of a serpent.