“It was, of course, a difficult task. Had he been in New York you would both have been watched night and day by men of the Thu-tseng. The Chinese make the finest ‘shadowers’ in the world and in New York they are so very numerous that I could employ them with impunity. In London they are too conspicuous. It was really through this that Humphreys nearly beat me at the finish.
“But I will give you an instance of how narrowly you escaped. Do you remember one night when we all had supper with Humphreys at a Chinese restaurant near Piccadilly Circus?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“And you remember that I signalled to you not to eat the cold soup that was served?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I thought you meant it was something I should not like.”
“You would have been dead in five days if you had eaten it,” said Feng grimly. “It was by a miracle of luck that I saw Humphreys drop into it a tiny pellet as he reached his hand out for some bread. The Chinese waiter took your soup away. Humphreys did not notice the Chinese remark I made to the waiter, but that soup was preserved and analyzed. It contained a virulent culture of the germs of typhoid fever. The Chinese waiter, of course, was an agent of the Thu-tseng. I daresay you will meet him some day. He happens to be a doctor and a great friend of mine. He analyzed the soup for me. If you had taken a spoonful of it while Humphreys was telling the funny stories at which you were laughing, you would have been dead in five days—of perfectly natural causes.”
“But, Thelma. Did you know anything of all this?” I asked turning to her, astounded and muddled.
“Some of the facts I knew, but not all,” she replied. “I hope you will forgive me, but I acted all along upon Doctor Feng’s instructions. At Mürren I knew nothing, and was entirely unsuspicious of the plot against us both.”
“Humphreys had degenerated into perhaps the cleverest financial crook in Eastern Europe,” said Feng. “The way in which he held Audley aloof from his wife while his friends Graydon and Ruthen were at the same time terrorizing him and compelling him to assist in passing their spurious notes, was a most remarkable feature of the case. He acted with such caution and pre-arranged things so cunningly, that I confess I was more than once misled and befogged.
“It was he who sent you those warnings from Hammersmith and North London in an endeavor to frighten you off. He certainly had a sort of superstitious fear of you. My chief fear for Thelma was that she might be secretly poisoned in a similar manner to the attempt upon yourself. Therefore I insisted that she should never take her meals in a restaurant alone.”