Furneaux pounded the table so viciously that the cups rattled.
"Of course, he has a nose to smell joss sticks, and eyes to see an ivory skull, but didn't he say I was talking nonsense when I spoke about Shang Ti scowling from a porcelain vase?" he shrilled.
"Yes. For all that, I don't think he missed the least hint of your meaning."
Furneaux gazed at Theydon fixedly.
"Sorry," he said, with an acid tone that was almost malicious. "I imagined you were so busy throwing dust in our eyes that you wouldn't have noticed such fine shades of perception on Winter's part."
But Theydon was now able to measure this strange little man with some degree of accuracy; he only smiled.
"As a thrower of dust I was a most abject failure," he said.
Furneaux smiled and turned to the millionaire.
"Pardon the interruption," he said. "Like every artist, I am pained when my best efforts are scoffed at by heedless mediocrity. You, at least, will understand what a big thing it was to deduce even the vaguest outline of the truth from the facts at my command."
"I certainly do," agreed Forbes. "Until this morning I was convinced that Mrs. Lester's death removed the one person in England who knew of my connection with the revolution in China. To revert to the Young Manchus—they have secured far more victims than the world at large is aware of. I am sure that they poisoned Arthur Lester, and his wife held the same view. They aim at nothing less than the extinction of the democratic cause by the murder of every prominent man connected with it. But they never yet have been able to obtain a full and authentic list of the reform leaders. They suspected poor Lester of complicity in the movement, and killed him. It was through Mrs. Lester that I first became aware of their existence as an active organization, and I hoped that when she had returned to England, and was living quietly in London, she would be lost sight of—ignored, in fact. Nevertheless, both she and I thought it prudent that our acquaintance should cease until the turmoil in China had subsided. For that reason I never visited her, nor did I permit the growth of friendship between her and my wife and daughter—a friendship which, in happier conditions, would have been natural and inevitable. But we were woefully mistaken. An Oriental vendetta neither slackens nor dies. By some means wholly unknown to me, the Young Manchus must have discovered, or guessed, that in leaving Lester's widow out of their reckoning they had lost a promising clew. Be that as it may, they followed her to London, and, by a singular fatality, I was the first to know of it. Last Monday, while driving home from the city, my car was held up in Piccadilly for a few seconds. Looking idly out at the passing crowd, I saw a Chinaman in European clothes. He was waiting to cross the road, so I was able to scrutinize him carefully, and, owing to a scar on the left side of his face, recognized him. His name is Wong Li Fu, a Manchu of the Manchus, a mandarin of almost imperial lineage. Some years ago he was a young attaché at the Chinese Embassy here. Suddenly, while on the way to my house, I recollected that certain members of the Revolutionary Committee had spoken of this very man as being one of the ablest and most unscrupulous adherents of the Manchu faction in Pekin. Somehow, his presence in London was disconcerting and menacing. Who more likely than he, I argued, to be a leading spirit among the Young Manchus? In any event, London was not big enough to hold both Mrs. Lester and him, and I decided to visit her that very night, tell her I had seen Wong Li Fu, and advise her to go away into the country, leaving no record of her whereabouts. I happened to be taking my daughter to Daly's Theater, and contrived to slip away on some pretext after the performance. I found Mrs. Lester alone in her flat, and she fell in with my views at once, because she, too, had heard of this very man, and the mere sound of his name terrified her. I was half inclined to urge that she should go to an hotel for the night, but the lateness of the hour and the seeming fact that if danger threatened she was safe at least till the morrow, prevented me."