A thousand outrageous possibilities fought for precedence in my mind.

“Smith!” I cried, “the half-caste woman whom I saw in the hotel ...”

Nayland Smith shrugged his shoulders.

“Probably, as M. Samarkan suggests, an ayah!” he said; but there was an odd note in his voice and an odd look in his eyes.

“Then again, I am almost certain that Hale’s warning concerning ’the man with the limp’ was no empty one.  Shall you open the brass chest?”

“At present, decidedly no.  Hale’s fate renders his warning one that I dare not neglect.  For I was with him when he died; and they cannot know how much I know.  How did he die?  How did he die?  How was the Flower of Silence introduced into his closely guarded room?”

“The Flower of Silence?”

Smith laughed shortly and unmirthfully.

“I was once sent for,” he said, “during the time that I was stationed in Upper Burma, to see a stranger—­a sort of itinerant Buddhist priest, so I understood, who had desired to communicate some message to me personally.  He was dying—­in a dirty hut on the outskirts of Manipur, up in the hills.  When I arrived I say at a glance that the man was a Tibetan monk.  He must have crossed the river and come down through Assam; but the nature of his message I never knew.  He had lost the power of speech!  He was gurgling, inarticulate, just like poor Hale.  A few moments after my arrival he breathed his last.  The fellow who had guided me to the place bent over him—­I shall always remember the scene—­then fell back as though he had stepped upon an adder.

“‘He holds the Flower Silence in his hand!’ he cried—­’the Si-Fan! the Si-Fan!’—­and bolted from the hut.”

“When I went to examine the dead man, sure enough he held in one hand a little crumpled spray of flowers.  I did not touch it with my fingers naturally, but I managed to loop a piece of twine around the stem, and by that means I gingerly removed the flowers and carried them to an orchid-hunter of my acquaintance who chanced to be visiting Manipur.

“Grahame—­that was my orchid man’s name—­pronounced the specimen to be an unclassified species of jatropha; belonging to the Curcas family.  He discovered a sort of hollow thorn, almost like a fang, amongst the blooms, but was unable to surmise the nature of its functions.  He extracted enough of a certain fixed oil from the flowers, however, to have poisoned the pair of us!”

“Probably the breaking of a bloom ...”

“Ejects some of this acrid oil through the thorn?  Practically the uncanny thing stings when it is hurt?  That is my own idea, Petrie.  And I can understand how these Eastern fanatics accept their sentence—­ silence and death—­when they have deserved it, at the hands of their mysterious organization, and commit this novel form of hara-kiri.  But I shall not sleep soundly with that brass coffer in my possession until I know by what means Sir Gregory was induced to touch a Flower of Silence, and by what means it was placed in his room!”