and inevitable.  But we were woefully mistaken.  An Oriental vendetta neither slackens nor dies.  By some means wholly unknown to me, the Young Manchus must have discovered, or guessed, that in leaving Lester’s widow out of their reckoning they had lost a promising clew.  Be that as it may, they followed her to London, and, by a singular fatality, I was the first to know of it.  Last Monday, while driving home from the city, my car was held up in Piccadilly for a few seconds.  Looking idly out at the passing crowd, I saw a Chinaman in European clothes.  He was waiting to cross the road, so I was able to scrutinize him carefully, and, owing to a scar on the left side of his face, recognized him.  His name is Wong Li Fu, a Manchu of the Manchus, a mandarin of almost imperial lineage.  Some years ago he was a young attaché at the Chinese Embassy here.  Suddenly, while on the way to my house, I recollected that certain members of the Revolutionary Committee had spoken of this very man as being one of the ablest and most unscrupulous adherents of the Manchu faction in Pekin.  Somehow, his presence in London was disconcerting and menacing.  Who more likely than he, I argued, to be a leading spirit among the Young Manchus?  In any event, London was not big enough to hold both Mrs. Lester and him, and I decided to visit her that very night, tell her I had seen Wong Li Fu, and advise her to go away into the country, leaving no record of her whereabouts.  I happened to be taking my daughter to Daly’s Theater, and contrived to slip away on some pretext after the performance.  I found Mrs. Lester alone in her flat, and she fell in with my views at once, because she, too, had heard of this very man, and the mere sound of his name terrified her.  I was half inclined to urge that she should go to an hotel for the night, but the lateness of the hour and the seeming fact that if danger threatened she was safe at least till the morrow, prevented me.”

Furneaux, sitting on the edge of a chair, his head bent forward, his piercing black eyes intent as those of a hawk, a hand resting on each knee, his attitude curiously suggestive of a readiness to spring forward at any instant, now leaned over and tapped the millionaire decisively on the shoulder.

“You couldn’t have saved her, Mr. Forbes,” he said gravely.  “She was marked down as the first warning.  Didn’t the letter you received this morning tell you something of the sort?”

Agitation gave place to utter astonishment in Forbes’s face.

“In Heaven’s name, how do you know anything of any letter?” he cried.

“I will tell you later.  But am I not right?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Where is it?  May I see it?”

Forbes took a creased and soiled document from a small, flat cardboard box which he carried in the breast pocket of his coat.  But first he withdrew from the box a little object, and placed it on the table.  It was an ivory skull, and the very presence of such a sinister token brought some hint of the charnel-house into the cozy and sunlit room.