t, he did not come, neither was there
any sign of him among all the crowd of faces that passed and repassed
before the new shrine.

XXIII

DEMONSTRATES THE TRUTH OF THE AXIOM THAT "THE UNEXPECTED ALWAYS HAPPENS"

At the time when Mhtoon Pah was standing in the centre of a gazing group
before the new shrine, and trying to forget that nothing except the news
of Leh Shin's hanging would give him real satisfaction, the Chinaman,
accompanied by the Burman, slipped up the channel of gloom under the
Colonnade and made his way into Paradise Street.

The Burman walked with an easy unconscious step, but Leh Shin crept
close to the wall and started when he passed a sleeping form in a
doorway. Night fears and that trembling anxiety that comes when
fulfilment is close at hand were upon him. He knew that the point in
view was to effect an entrance into the curio shop, the threshold of
which he had not crossed since his last black hour of misfortune had
struck and he had gone out a beggar.

Everything in his life lay on the other side of the shop door; all his
happy, prosperous, careless days, all the good years. Every one of them
was stored there just as surely as Mhtoon Pah's ivories and carved
screens and silks were stored safe against the encroachment of damp and
must. His old self might even be somewhere in the silent house, and it
takes a special quality of courage for a man to return and walk through
a doorway into the long past. For the first time for years he remembered
how he had brought his little son into the shop, and how the child had
laughed and crowed at the sight of amber and crystal chains.

Even Mhtoon Pah grew dim in his mind, and he dallied with the forgotten
memories as he stood shaking in an archway watching the Burman cross the
street. Insensibly the Burman's mania had waned in the last few hours,
and he had grown silent and preoccupied, a fact that escaped Leh Shin's
notice. His owl eyes blinked with the strain of staring through the
wavering light, and his memories strove with him as though in physical
combat. Mhtoon Pah was no longer in the house, and instead of his shadow
another influence seemed to brood there, something that called to Leh
Shin, but not with the wild cry of hate. Before the days of still
greater affluence Leh Shin had lived there with his little Burmese wife.

The Burman was on his knees, having some difficulty with the lock. He
could see him fighting it, and at last he saw