Forbes could not help but recover some of his shattered nerve in view of the detective’s airy optimism.  Still, he was shaken and dubious.

“Don’t forget that the Chinese Ambassador has no knowledge whatsoever of my share in the revolution,” he said.

“And don’t forget that for ways which are dark and tricks which are vain the heathen Chinee is peculiar,” retorted Furneaux.  “How can you be sure that there is not in the Embassy at this moment a full statement of your payments into the reformers’ funds, as well as the list of conspirators which our friend Wong Li Fu is in search of?”

“I think that such a thing is almost impossible.”

“Is there anything really impossible?  We used to believe that once a man was dead he could not be brought to life again.  A Frenchman has just demonstrated that by a judicious application of galvanism to the heart and salt water to the veins any average corpse can be revived.”

Evidently Furneaux was enjoying himself.  He sat there, absorbing new impressions and irradiating scraps of irrelevant knowledge in a way that would have been full of significance to Winter had he been present.  Furneaux was never so mercurial, never so ready to jump from one subject to another, as when his subtle brain was working at high pressure.

He actually reveled in a crime which lay on the borderland of the exotic and the grotesque.  Like the French philosopher in Poe’s “Tales of Mystery and Imagination,” the savant who read his newspaper in a dingy Paris room, and solved by sheer force of intellect extraordinary criminal problems which baffled the shrewdest official minds, he felt in relation to this particular tragedy that he required only to be brought in touch with certain contingent forces bound up with it—­ Forbes, for instance, and, in a minor degree, Theydon—­ and in due course he would be able to go forth and find the master wrongdoer.

Suddenly the millionaire seemed to cast off the cloak of despair which clogged his energies and impaired his brilliant intellect.  He rose to his feet and involuntarily squared his shoulders.

“Surely we are wasting valuable hours which should be given to action,” he cried.  “I am going to the city and shall arrange for a prolonged absence from my office.  Then I’ll hurry home, perfect my defenses, and defy these murderous curs.  My wife must come to London.  In a crisis like this I must have my loved ones under my own personal supervision.  I can still shoot straight and quick, and woe betide any man, white or yellow, who enters my house unbidden.  As for this infernal symbol—­ !”

He raised a clenched fist, and would have pounded into fragments the thin fabric of the ivory skull still lying where he had placed it on the table had not Furneaux snatched it into safety.

“No, no!” protested the detective.  “I want that for purposes of comparison.  Kindly give me that typed note, too, Mr. Forbes.  It may bear finger-marks.  You never can tell.  The cardboard box in which it was posted also.  Thank you.  Now, a few more questions before you go.  How much money did you provide for the revolutionaries?”