“Out there in the mist,” he concluded wearily, “it all seemed very unreal.”

“I wish to God it had been!”

“Amen to that, Mr. Weymouth.  But your brother made a gallant finish.  If ridding the world of Fu-Manchu were the only good deed to his credit, his life had been well spent.”

James Weymouth smoked awhile in thoughtful silence.  Though but four and a half miles S.S.E. of St. Paul’s the quaint little cottage, with its rustic garden, shadowed by the tall trees which had so lined the village street before motor ’buses were, was a spot as peaceful and secluded as any in broad England.  But another shadow lay upon it to-day—­chilling, fearful.  An incarnate evil had come out of the dim East and in its dying malevolence had touched this home.

“There are two things I don’t understand about it, sir,” continued Weymouth.  “What was the meaning of the horrible laughter which the river police heard in the fog?  And where are the bodies?”

Karamaneh, seated beside me, shuddered at the words.  Smith, whose restless spirit granted him little repose, paused in his aimless wanderings about the room and looked at her.

In these latter days of his Augean labors to purge England of the unclean thing which had fastened upon her, my friend was more lean and nervous-looking than I had ever known him.  His long residence in Burma had rendered him spare and had burned his naturally dark skin to a coppery hue; but now his gray eyes had grown feverishly bright and his face so lean as at times to appear positively emaciated.  But I knew that he was as fit as ever.

“This lady may be able to answer your first question,” he said.  “She and her brother were for some time in the household of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  In fact, Mr. Weymouth, Karamaneh, as her name implies, was a slave.”

Weymouth glanced at the beautiful, troubled face with scarcely veiled distrust.  “You don’t look as though you had come from China, miss,” he said, with a sort of unwilling admiration.

“I do not come from China,” replied Karamaneh.  “My father was a pure Bedawee.  But my history does not matter.”  (At times there was something imperious in her manner; and to this her musical accent added force.) “When your brave brother, Inspector Weymouth, and Dr. Fu-Manchu, were swallowed up by the river, Fu-Manchu held a poisoned needle in his hand.  The laughter meant that the needle had done its work.  Your brother had become mad!”

Weymouth turned aside to hide his emotion.  “What was on the needle?” he asked huskily.

“It was something which he prepared from the venom of a kind of swamp adder,” she answered.  “It produces madness, but not always death.”

“He would have had a poor chance,” said Smith, “even had he been in complete possession of his senses.  At the time of the encounter we must have been some considerable distance from shore, and the fog was impenetrable.”