"When did you last hear from Nayland Smith?" asked my visitor.

I paused, my hand on the siphon, reflecting for a moment.

"Two months ago," I said: "he's a poor correspondent and rather
soured, I fancy."

"What--a woman or something?"

"Some affair of that sort. He's such a reticent beggar, I really know
very little about it."

I placed a whisky and soda before the Rev. J. D. Eltham, also sliding
the tobacco jar nearer to his hand. The refined and sensitive face of
the clergyman offered no indication to the truculent character of the
man. His scanty fair hair, already grey over the temples, was silken
and soft-looking: in appearance he was indeed a typical English
churchman; but in China he had been known as "the fighting
missionary," and had fully deserved the title. In fact, this
peaceful-looking gentleman had directly brought about the Boxer
Risings!

"You know," he said in his clerical voice, but meanwhile stuffing
tobacco into an old pipe with fierce energy, "I have often wondered,
Petrie--I have never left off wondering--"

"What?"

"That accursed Chinaman! Since the cellar place beneath the site of
the burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village--I have wondered more than
ever."

He lighted his pipe and walked to the hearth to throw the match in the
grate.

"You see," he continued, peering across at me in his oddly nervous
way--"one never knows, does one? If I thought that Dr. Fu-Manchu lived;
if I seriously suspected that that stupendous intellect, that wonderful
genius, Petrie, er"--he hesitated characteristically--"survived, I
should feel it my duty--"

"Well?" I said, leaning my elbows on the table and smiling slightly.

"If that Satanic genius were not indeed destroyed, then the peace of
the world might be threatened anew at any moment!"

He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner
I knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man
composed of the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical
frock.

"He may have got back to China, doctor!" he cried, and his eyes had
the fighting glint in them. "Could you rest in peace if you thought
that he lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a
night-call took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years
since he was here amongst us, since we were searching every shadow for
those awful green eyes! What became of his band of assassins--his
stranglers, his dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and
what-not--the army of creatures--"

He paused, taking a drink.

"You"--he hesitated diffidently--"searched in Egypt with Nayland
Smith, did you not?"

I nodded.

"Contradict me if I am wrong," he continued; "but my impression is
that you were searching for the girl--the girl--Kâramanèh, I think
she was called?"

"Yes," I replied shortly; "but we could find no trace--no trace."

"You--er--were interested?"

"More than I knew," I replied, "until I realized that I had--lost
her."

"I never met Kâramanèh, but from your account, and from others, she
was quite unusually--"

"She was very beautiful," I said, and stood up, for I was anxious to
terminate that phase of the conversation.

Eltham regarded me sympathetically; he knew something of my search
with Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed Eastern girl who had brought
romance into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her
as I loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese
doctor who had been her master.

Eltham began to pace up and down the rug, his pipe bubbling furiously;
and something in the way he carried his head reminded me momentarily
of Nayland Smith. Certainly, between this pink-faced clergyman, with
his deceptively mild appearance, and the gaunt, bronzed and
steely-eyed Burmese commissioner, there was externally little in
common; but it was some little nervous trick in his carriage that
conjured up through the smoke-haze one distant summer evening when
Smith had paced that very room as Eltham paced it now, when before my
startled eyes he had rung up the curtain upon the savage drama in
which, though I little suspected it then, Fate had cast me for a
leading rôle.

I wondered if Eltham's thoughts ran parallel with mine. My own were
centred upon the unforgettable figure of the murderous Chinaman. These
words, exactly as Smith had used them, seemed once again to sound in
my ears: "Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered,
with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven
skull and long magnetic eyes of the true cat green. Invest him with
all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race accumulated in one
giant intellect, with all the resources of science, past and present,
and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the 'Yellow Peril'
incarnate in one man."

This visit of Eltham's no doubt was responsible for my mood; for this
singular clergyman had played his part in the drama of two years ago.

"I should like to see Smith again," he said suddenly; "it seems a pity
that a man like that should be buried in Burma. Burma makes a mess of
the best of men, doctor. You said he was not married?"

"No," I replied shortly, "and is never likely to be, now."

"Ah, you hinted at something of the kind."

"I know very little of it. Nayland Smith is not the kind of man to
talk much."

"Quite so--quite so! And, you know, doctor, neither am I; but"--he was
growing painfully embarrassed--"it may be your due--I--er--I have a
correspondent, in the interior of China--"

"Well?" I said, watching him in sudden eagerness.

"Well, I would not desire to raise--vain hopes--nor to occasion, shall
I say, empty fears; but--er ... no, doctor!" He flushed like a girl.
"It was wrong of me to open this conversation. Perhaps, when I know
more--will you forget my words, for the time?"

The 'phone bell rang.

"Hullo!" cried Eltham--"hard luck, doctor!"--but I could see that he
welcomed the interruption. "Why!" he added, "it is one o'clock!"

I went to the telephone.

"Is that Dr. Petrie?" inquired a woman's voice.

"Yes; who is speaking?"

"Mrs. Hewett has been taken more seriously ill. Could you come at
once?"

"Certainly," I replied, for Mrs. Hewett was not only a profitable
patient but an estimable lady. "I shall be with you in a quarter of an
hour."

I hung up the receiver.

"Something urgent?" asked Eltham, emptying his pipe.

"Sounds like it. You had better turn in."

"I should much prefer to walk over with you, if it would not be
intruding. Our conversation has ill prepared me for sleep."

"Right!" I said, for I welcomed his company; and three minutes later
we were striding across the deserted common.

A sort of mist floated amongst the trees, seeming in the moonlight
like a veil draped from trunk to trunk, as in silence we passed the
Mound Pond, and struck out for the north side of the common.

I suppose the presence of Eltham and the irritating recollection of
his half-confidence were the responsible factors, but my mind
persistently dwelt upon the subject of Fu-Manchu and the atrocities
which he had committed during his sojourn in England. So actively was
my imagination at work that I felt again the menace which so long had
hung over me; I felt as though that murderous yellow cloud still cast
its shadow upon England. And I found myself longing for the company of
Nayland Smith. I cannot state what was the nature of Eltham's
reflections, but I can guess; for he was as silent as I.