To what strange adventure were we committed? What did the brass coffer
contain which Sir Gregory had guarded night and day? Something
associated in some way with Tibet, something which he believed to be
"the key of India" and which had brought in its train, presumably,
the sinister "man with a limp."

Who was the "man with the limp"? What was the Si-Fan? Lastly, by what
conceivable means could the flower, which my friend evidently regarded
with extreme horror, have been introduced into Hale's room, and why
had I been required to pronounce the words "Sâkya Mûni"?

So ran my reflections--at random and to no clear end; and, as is often
the case in such circumstances, my steps bore them company; so that
all at once I became aware that instead of having gained the lobby of
the hotel, I had taken some wrong turning and was in a part of the
building entirely unfamiliar to me.

A long corridor of the inevitable white marble extended far behind me.
I had evidently traversed it. Before me was a heavily curtained archway.
Irritably, I pulled the curtain aside, learnt that it masked a
glass-paneled door, opened this door--and found myself in a small
court, dimly lighted and redolent of some pungent, incense-like perfume.

One step forward I took, then pulled up abruptly. A sound had come to
my ears. From a second curtained doorway, close to my right hand, it
came--a sound of muffled _tapping_, together with that of something
which dragged upon the floor.

Within my brain the words seemed audibly to form: "The man with