silk
over his knees; all the displaced rolls had been put back. He had worked
swiftly and with the greatest care that no trace of his visit should be
known later.

Leh Shin slid out again. The passage was dark as pitch, but he knew
every turn and twist of its windings, and he knew that it led down to
the cellars below the house. He was awake and alert now as Coryndon
himself, and as he strained his ears he caught a sound. He listened
again with horrible eagerness, looked back into the shop and saw the
stooping head going over every yard of a roll of fine silk faithfully;
and then he gripped the knife under his belt and, feeling along the wall
with his free hand, followed along the corridor. Once only he glanced
round and then the darkness of the corridor swallowed him from sight.

Coryndon, busy with the silk made by the lake-dwellers spread over his
knees, knew nothing of Leh Shin's disappearance. The fever of chase was
in his blood, and he threw the flimsy yards through his hands. Nothing,
nothing, and again nothing, and again--he felt his heart swell with
sudden, stifled excitement. Under his hand was a three-cornered rent, a
damaged piece where a patch rather larger than his palm had been roughly
cut out. His usually steady hand shook as he put the stained rag over it
and fitted it into the place.

"Leh Shin," he called, as he rose, but he called softly.

No sound answered his whisper, and he stiffened his body and listened.
He had been wrong. There was a sound, but it did not come from inside
the shop: it was the slow footstep of a heavy man pausing to find a key.

Coryndon listened no longer. He closed the door of the silk cupboard,
bundled up the yards of silk in his arms and extinguishing the lamp
darted behind a screen. It was a heavy carved teak screen, inset with
silk panels embroidered with a long spray of hanging wistaria on a dark
yellow ground. As he hid himself, he cursed his own stupidity. In the
excitement of his desire to enter the curio shop, he had forgotten to
hamper the lock with pebbles.

After what seemed an age, the door opened slowly and Mhtoon Pah came in.
Something, he knew not what, had dragged him away from the Pagoda, and
dragged him back to his shop. His eyes looked mad and unnatural in the
light of the lantern he held in his hand, and he shut the door and stood
like a dog who scents danger, and stared round the room. He walked to
the silk cupboard and looked in through the glass p