t money, Shway. Only my house is empty; my hearth is cold. My
heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the
paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with
laughter. There will never be any fat babies rolling about the mats or
swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells the _Sehn-nee_,
the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that
treasure now?"

"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show
himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"

"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.

"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth
between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling
maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he
could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like
Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the
shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his
breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in
pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had
found Mah Soung....

But then--he told himself hastily--he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he
had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender
yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were
lifted to the sacred image.

A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that
now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures
a bit too far off white man's ground.

He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her
water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured
invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the
Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and
Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken
forever.

She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They
had spoken in a hill dialect, all incomprehensible to her.... She was
not Mah Soung, of course--though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and
chill.

"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw--"I have learned how
my child died--"

Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.

"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid
for twice."

"There remains, however, Shway, every man's