Won't
you help me to understand?"
I took her unresisting hand, and drew her toward me. My very soul
seemed to thrill at the contact of her lithe body....
She was trembling wildly and seemed to be trying to speak, but
although her lips framed the words no sound followed. Suddenly
comprehension came to me. I looked down into the street, hitherto
deserted ... and into the upturned face of Fu-Manchu!
Wearing a heavy fur-collared coat, and with his yellow, malignant
countenance grotesquely horrible beneath the shadow of a large tweed
motor cap, he stood motionless, looking up at me. That he had seen me,
I could not doubt; but had he seen my companion?
In a choking whisper Karamaneh answered my unspoken question.
"He has not seen me! I have done much for you; do in return a small
thing for me! Save my life!"
She dragged me back from the window and fled across the room to the
weird laboratory where I had lain captive. Throwing herself upon the
divan, she held out her white wrists and glanced significantly at the
manacles.
"Lock them upon me!" she said rapidly. "Quick! quick!"
Great as was my mental disturbance, I managed to grasp the purpose of
this device. The very extremity of my danger found me cool. I fastened
the manacles, which so recently had confined my own wrists, upon the
slim wrists of Karamaneh. A faint and muffled disturbance, doubly
ominous because there was nothing to proclaim its nature, reached me
from some place below, on the ground floor.
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