"What size and shape?" "It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape; but I saw quite six feet of it flash across the grass!" "Did you hear anything?" "A swishing sound in the shrubbery, then nothing more." She met my eyes expectantly. Her confidence in my powers of understanding and sympathy was gratifying, though I knew that I but occupied the position of a father-confessor. "Have you any idea," I said, "how it came about that you awoke in the train yesterday whilst your father did not?" "We had coffee at a refreshment-room; it must have been drugged in some way. I scarcely tasted mine, the flavor was so awful; but father is an old traveler and drank the whole of his cupful!" Mr. Eltham's voice called from below. "Dr. Petrie," said the girl quickly, "what do you think they want to do to him?" "Ah!" I replied, "I wish I knew that." "Will you think over what I have told you? For I do assure you there is something here in Redmoat--something that comes and goes in spite of father's 'fortifications'? Caesar knows there is. Listen to him. He drags at his chain so that I wonder he does not break it." As we passed downstairs the howling of the mastiff sounded eerily through the house, as did the clank-clank of the tightening chain as he threw the weight of his big body upon it. I sat in Smith's room that night for some time, he pacing the floor smoking and talking. "Eltham has influential Chinese friends," he said; "but they dare not have him in Nan-Yang at present. He knows the country as he knows Norfolk; he would see things! "His precautions here have baffled the enemy, I think. The attempt in the train points to an anxiety to waste no opportunity. But whilst Eltham was absent (he was getting his outfit in London, by the way) they have been fixing some second string to their fiddle here. In case no opportunity offered before he returned, they provided for getting at him here!" "But how, Smith?" "That's the mystery. But the dead dog in the shrubbery is significant." "Do you think some emissary of Fu-Manchu is actually inside the moat?" "It's impossible, Petrie. You are thinking of secret passages, and so forth. There are none. Eltham has measured up every foot of the place. There isn't a rathole left unaccounted for; and as for a tunnel under the moat, the house stands on a solid mass of Roman masonry, a former camp of Hadrian's time. I have seen a very old plan of the Round Moat Priory as it was called. There is no entrance and no exit save by the steps. So how was the dog killed?" I knocked out my pipe on a bar of the grate. "We are in the thick of it here," I said.