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were singing in my brain: “Don’t despair… Dr. Fu-Manchu once had a daughter.” The significance of the words was not yet clear to me, but I found in them, gladly, something to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable.
    “Ardatha, my dearest, you
must
believe. How could I know your name—or worship you as I do—if we had never been lovers? You
have
forgotten—God knows why or how—and it
is
true.”
    She made a perceptible effort to control herself, and when she spoke, although her voice was unsteady it had regained its natural timbre.
    “I am trying to believe you—although to do so means that I must have had a mental breakdown and forgotten that, too. You asked me where Nayland Smith had gone. He ran to the garage: it is straight along this path. I cannot tell you where Dr. Fu-Manchu is: I do not know. But unless you let me go I shall die—”
    “Die! why should you die?”
    “Next time we meet I will try to tell you.” She pressed her face against my shoulder. “But I am to believe
you
, then you must believe
me.
See—I trust you. I took it a long time ago from your pocket—”
    And she handed me my Colt!
    I released Ardatha and stood there, the automatic in my hand, trying to adjust my ideas to a new scheme of things, when from far away up near the house came Barton’s great voice: “Kerrigan! Where are you? Give me a hail.”
    I turned and shouted:
    “This way, Barton.”
    But, as I swung about again—Ardatha had vanished! Her cloak I held over my arm, the Colt was still grasped in my hand. I dropped it back in my pocket, snatched out the torch and flashed a ray ahead.
    Nothing moved, and I could hear no footstep. Water was dripping mournfully from the roof of a glass-house, and a long way off I detected insistent hooting of a motor horn.
    The raid squad was coming.
    Why was Nayland Smith silent? There was something ominous about it. I have said, and I confess it again, that at first sight of Ardatha every other idea in my mind had been swept out; and whilst I had stood there (my heart was still pounding madly) it was quite possible—
    “Have you found Smith?” Barton cried. “Show a light. I’ve caught something, and—”
    I turned back and threw a moving fan of light on the path which led to the house. As I did so, an overpowering smell of hawthorn swept down upon me as if home on a sudden breeze. Too late, a decimal of a second too late, I ducked and half turned.
    My head was enveloped in what felt like a moist rubber bag… I experienced a sensation of sinking, not swiftly, but as if floating gently downward, into deep clouds of hawthorn blossom.

CHAPTER SIX
DR. FU-MANCHU EXPERIMENTS
    I seemed to break through some brittle surface into a plane of violet light—and silence. There was a rapidly-receding background, a memory of wild action, of the drip of moisture, of a noisome tunnel and moving water. Here, all was still; nothing was visible in that luminous expanse. Then, a long way off, I heard the voice of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
    “A member of my family, a mandarin of my rank, is bound by codes stronger than bands of steel. For myself I ask nothing. I hold the key which unlocks the heart of the secret East; holding that key, I command the obedience of an army greater than any ever controlled by one man…”
    This must be delirium; for no living thing was in sight: I was alone in a violet void.
    “My power rests in the East, but my hand is stretched out to the West. I shall restore the lost grandeur of China. When your civilization, as you are pleased to term it, has exterminated itself, when you have reduced to ashes your palaces and your temples, when in your blindness you have set back the clock which so laboriously you fashioned, I shall stir. Out of the fire I shall arise. The red dusk of the West will have fallen, the golden dawn of the East will come—”
    The voice faded, and at the same time that mysterious radiance also grew dim, as though it had been a mirage created by the voice