Fu-Manchu, finding his experiment to be proceeding favourably, lifted
his eyes to me again.

"You are interested in my poor _Cynocephalyte_?" he said; and his eyes
were filmed like the eyes of one afflicted with cataract. "He was a
devoted servant, Dr. Petrie, but the lower influences in his genealogy
sometimes conquered. Then he got out of hand; and at last he was so
ungrateful toward those who had educated him, that, in one of those
paroxysms of his, he attacked and killed a most faithful Burman, one
of my oldest followers."

Fu-Manchu returned to his experiment.

Not the slightest emotion had he exhibited thus far, but had chatted
with me as any other scientist might chat with a friend who casually
visits his laboratory. The horror of the thing was playing havoc with
my own composure, however. There I lay, fettered, in the same room
with this man whose existence was a menace to the entire white race,
whilst placidly he pursued an experiment designed, if his own words
were believable, to cut me off from my kind--to wreak some change,
psychological or physiological I knew not; to place me, it might be,
upon a level with such brute things as that which now hung, half
floating, in the glass jar!

Something I know of the history of that ghastly specimen, that thing
neither man nor ape; for within my own knowledge had it not attempted
the life of Nayland Smith, and was it not _I_ who, with an axe, had
maimed it in the instant of one of its last slayings?

Of these things Dr. Fu-Manchu was well aware, so that his placid
speech was doubly, trebly horrible to my ears. I sought, furtively, to
move my arms, only to realize that, as I had anticipated, the
handcuffs were chained to a ring in the wall behind me. The
establishments of Dr. Fu-Manchu were always well provided with such
contrivances as these.

I uttered a short, harsh laugh. Fu-Manchu stood up slowly from the
table, and, placing the test-tube in a rack, deposited the latter
carefully upon a shelf at his side.

"I am happy to find you in such good humour," he said softly. "Other
affairs call me; and, in my absence, that profound knowledge of
chemistry, of which I have had evidence in the past, will enable you
to follow with intelligent interest the action of these violet rays
upon this exceptionally fine specimen of Siberian _Amanita muscaria_.
At some future time, possibly when you are my guest in China--which
country I am now making arrangements for you