Then he had it open, and I stepped out, close on his heels, and left
the door ajar.

"We must not appear to have come from your house," explained Smith
rapidly. "I will go along the highroad and cross to the common a
hundred yards up, where there is a pathway, as though homeward bound
to the north side. Give me half a minute's start, then you proceed in
an opposite direction and cross from the corner of the next road.
Directly you are out of the light of the street lamps, get over the
rails and run for the elms!"

He thrust a pistol into my hand and was off.

While he had been with me, speaking in that incisive, impetuous way of
his, with his dark face close to mine, and his eyes gleaming like
steel, I had been at one with him in his feverish mood, but now, when
I stood alone, in that staid and respectable byway, holding a loaded
pistol in my hand, the whole thing became utterly unreal.

It was in an odd frame of mind that I walked to the next corner, as
directed; for I was thinking, not of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the great and evil
man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule, not of
Nayland Smith, who alone stood between the Chinaman and the
realization of his monstrous schemes, not even of Karamaneh the slave
girl, whose glorious beauty was a weapon of might in Fu-Manchu's hand,
but of what impression I must have made upon a patient had I
encountered one then.

Such were my ideas up to the moment that I crossed to the common and