“I quite understand,” I replied dully.  “There have been times in the past when I, too, have doubted my sanity in my dealings with the group who now hold us in their power.”

“But,” reiterated the other, his voice rising higher and higher, “what does it mean, my dear sir?  It is incredible—­fantastic!  Even now I find it difficult to disabuse my mind of that old, haunting idea.”

“Disabuse it at once, Sir Baldwin,” I said bitterly.  “The facts are as you see them; the explanation, at any rate in your own case, is quite beyond me.  I was tracked ...”

“Hush! some one is coming!”

We both turned and stared at an opening before which hung a sort of gaudily embroidered mat, as the sound of dragging footsteps, accompanied by a heavy tapping, announced the approach of some one.

The mat was pulled aside by Zarmi.  She turned her head, flashing around the apartment a glance of her black eyes, then held the drapery aside to admit the entrance of another....

Supporting himself by the aid of two heavy walking sticks and painfully dragging his gaunt frame along, Dr. Fu-Manchu entered!

I think I have never experienced in my life a sensation identical to that which now possessed me.  Although Nayland Smith had declared that Fu-Manchu was alive, yet I would have sworn upon oath before any jury summonable that he was dead; for with my own eyes I had seen the bullet enter his skull.  Now, whilst I crouched against the matting-covered wall, teeth tightly clenched and my very hair quivering upon my scalp, he dragged himself laboriously across the room, the sticks going tap—­tap—­tap upon the floor, and the tall body, enveloped in a yellow robe, bent grotesquely, gruesomely, with every effort which he made.  He wore a surgical bandage about his skull and its presence seemed to accentuate the height of the great domelike brow, to throw into more evil prominence the wonderful, Satanic countenance of the man.  His filmed eyes turning to right and left, he dragged himself to a wooden chair that stood beside the operating-table and sank down upon it, breathing sibilantly, exhaustedly.

Zarmi dropped the curtain and stood before it.  She had discarded the dripping overall which she had been wearing when I had followed her across the common, and now stood before me with her black, frizzy hair unconfined and her beautiful, wicked face uplifted in a sort of cynical triumph.  The big gold rings in her ears glittered strangely in the light of the electric lamps.  She wore a garment which looked like a silken shawl wrapped about her in a wildly picturesque fashion, and, her hands upon her hips, leant back against the curtain glancing defiantly from Sir Baldwin to myself.

Those moments of silence which followed the entrance of the Chinese Doctor live in my memory and must live there for ever.  Only the labored breathing of Fu-Manchu disturbed the stillness of the place.  Not a sound penetrated to the room, no one uttered a word; then—­