her."

"I never met Karamaneh, 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 smoky 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 role.

I wondered if Eltham's thoughts ran parallel with mine. My own were
centered 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