are not rare, but this one had an odd personality, and moreover his
keen gaze was raking the place from ceiling to floor.

Where had I met him before? To the best of my recollection I had
never set eyes upon the man prior to that moment; and since he was
so palpably an American I had no reason for assuming him to be
associated with the Hashishin. But I remembered--indeed, I could
never forget--how, in the recent past, I had met with an apparent
associate of the Moslems as evidently European as this curiously
alert visitor was American. Moreover . . . there was something
tauntingly familiar, yet elusive, about that gaunt face.

Was it not upon the eve of the death of Professor Deeping that the
girl with the violet eyes had first intruded her fascinating
personality into my tangled affairs? Patently, she had then been
seeking the holy slipper, and by craft had endeavoured to bend me
to her will. Then had I not encountered her again, meeting the
glance of her unforgettable violet eyes outside a Strand hotel?
The encounter had presaged a further attempt upon the slipper!
Certainly she acted on behalf of someone interested in it; and since
neither Bristol nor I could conceive of any one seeking to possess
the bloodstained thing except the mysterious leader of the
Hashishin--Hassan of Aleppo--as a creature of that awful fanatic
being I had written her down.

Why, then, if the mysterious Eastern employed a European girl,
should he not also employ an American man? It might well be that
the relic, in entering the doors of the impregnable Antiquarian
Museum, had passed where the diabolical arts of the Hashishin had
no power to reach it--where the beauty of Western women and the