ned out the rule and measured the
distance from the further edge of the table to the tips of Smith's
fingers.

"Twenty-eight inches--and I have a long reach!" snapped Smith,
withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. "There's
one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without
delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It's a
pity, but we can not afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the
aesthetic. What do you make of the sound like the cracking of a whip?"

"I make nothing of it, Smith," I replied, wearily. "It might have been a
thick branch of ivy breaking beneath the weight of a climber."

"Did it sound like it?"

"I must confess that the explanation does not convince me, but I have no
better one."

Smith, permitting his pipe to go out, sat staring straight before him,
and tugging at the lobe of his left ear.

"The old bewilderment is seizing me," I continued. "At first, when I
realized that Dr. Fu-Manchu was back in England, when I realized that
an elaborate murder-machine was set up somewhere in London, it seemed
unreal, fantastical. Then I met--Karamaneh! She, whom we thought to be
his victim, showed herself again to be his slave. Now, with Weymouth and
Scotland Yard at work, the old secret evil is established again in our
midst, unaccountably--our lives are menaced--sleep is a danger--every
shadow threatens death... oh! it is awful."

Smith remained silent; he did not seem to have heard my words. I knew
these moods and had learnt that it was useless to seek to interrupt
them. With his brows drawn down, and his deep-set eyes staring into
space, he sat there gripping his cold pipe so tightly that my own jaw
muscles ached sympathetically. No man was better equipped than this
gaunt British Commissioner to stand between society and the menace of
the Yellow Doctor; I respected his meditations, for, unlike my own, they
were informed by an intimate knowledge of the dark and secret things of
the East, of that mysterious East out of which Fu-Manchu came, of that
jungle of noxious things whose miasma had been wafted Westward with the
implacable Chinaman.

I walked quietly from the room, occupied with my own bitter reflections.

CHAPTER XV. BEWITCHMENT

"You say you have two items of news for me?" said Nayland Smith, looking
across the breakfast table to where Inspector Weymouth sat sipping
coffee.

"There are two points--yes," replied the Scotl