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 shade 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.
“Tie something around my mouth!” directed Karamaneh with nervous rapidity. As I began to look about me:—“Tear a strip from my dress,” she said; “do not hesitate—be quick! be quick!”
I seized the flimsy muslin and tore off half a yard or so from the hem of the skirt. The voice of Dr Fu-Manchu became audible. He was speaking rapidly, sibilantly, and evidently was approaching—would be upon me in a matter of moments. I fastened the strip of fabric over the girl’s mouth and tied it behind, experiencing a pang half pleasurable and half fearful as I found my hands in contact with the foamy luxuriance of her hair.