With such glad anticipations as my pen cannot describe, their gladness not unmixed with fear, I retired to rest that night, scarcely expecting to sleep, so eager was I for the morrow. The musical voice of Kâramaneh seemed to ring in my ears; I seemed to feel the touch of her soft hands and to detect, as I drifted into the borderland betwixt reality and slumber, that faint, exquisite perfume which from the first moment of my meeting with the beautiful Eastern girl, had become to me inseparable from her personality. It seemed that sleep had but just claimed me when I was awakened by some one roughly shaking my shoulder. I sprang upright, my mind alert to sudden danger. The room looked yellow and dismal, illuminated as it was by a cold light of dawn which crept through the window and with which competed the luminance of the electric lamps. Nayland Smith stood at my bedside, partially dressed! "Wake up, Petrie!" he cried; "your instincts serve you better than my reasoning. Hell's afoot, old man! Even as you predicted it, perhaps in that same hour, the yellow fiends were at work!" "What, Smith, what!" I said, leaping out of bed; "you don't mean----" "Not that, old man," he replied, clapping his hand upon my shoulder; "there is no further news of _her_, but Weymouth is waiting outside. Sir Baldwin Frazer has disappeared!" I rubbed my eyes hard and sought to clear my mind of the vapors of sleep. "Sir Baldwin Frazer!" I said, "of Half-Moon Street? But what----" "God knows _what_," snapped Smith; "but our old friend Zarmi, or so it would appear, bore him off last night, and he has completely vanished, leaving practically no trace behind." Only a few sleeping servants were about as we descended the marble stairs to the lobby of the hotel where Weymouth was awaiting us. "I have a cab outside from the Yard," he said. "I came straight here to fetch you before going on to Half-Moon Street." "Quite right!" snapped Smith; "but you are sure the cab is from the Yard? I have had painful experience of strange cabs recently!" "You can trust this one," said Weymouth, smiling slightly. "It has carried me to the scene of many a crime." "Hem!" said Smith--"a dubious recommendation." We entered the waiting vehicle and soon were passing through the nearly deserted streets of London. Only those workers whose toils began with the dawn were afoot at that early hour, and in the misty gray light the streets had an unfamiliar look and wore an aspect of sadness in ill accord with the sentiments which now were stirring within me. For whatever might be the fate of the famous mental specialist, whatever the mystery before us--even though Dr. Fu-Manchu himself, malignantly active, threatened our safety--Kâramaneh would be with me again that day--Kâramaneh, my beautiful wife to be!