anes, but did not
open it or discover that it was unlocked. He paced round the room,
stopping before the screen, his eyes still reflecting his trouble of
mind.

From behind the screen, Coryndon watched every stir he made; he saw the
look on his face and noted Mhtoon Pah's smallest movement. There was no
evidence of thieves, and yet suspicion made itself plain in every line
of the curio dealer's body. At last, with a gasping sigh, he sat before
the small figure of an alabaster Gaudama and stared at it with unwinking
eyes.

"I shed no blood," he said, in a low rattling voice. "I shed no blood.
My hands are clean."

Over and over he repeated the words, like an incantation, his voice
rising and falling, until Coryndon could have emerged from his hiding
and taken him by the throat.

The thought of coming out upon Mhtoon Pah crossed his mind, but his
instinct held him back. He wondered desperately where Leh Shin had gone,
and if he would come in upon the Burman making his strange prayer. Still
Mhtoon Pah repeated the words and swayed to and fro before the image of
the Buddha, and the very moments seemed to pause and listen with
Coryndon. The shop was close and the air oppressive. Little trickles of
sweat ran down his neck and made channels in the stain on his skin, and
still Coryndon waited in tense suspense.

For nearly ten minutes Mhtoon Pah continued to rock and mutter on the
floor, and then he got up, and, taking his lantern, went out by the door
into the passage. Coryndon waited for the sound of a scuffle and a
fall, but none came, and he was in the dark, surrounded by silence once
more.

Without waiting to consider, he followed across the room and saw the
swinging light go down the passage and disappear suddenly. It seemed to
Coryndon that Mhtoon Pah had disappeared, as though he had gone through
the wall at the end of the passage, and he followed slowly. Silence
locked him in again, the dark, motionless silence of enclosed space.

He did not dare to call out again to Leh Shin, and for all that he could
tell, the Chinaman might have been an arm's-reach away from him in the
darkness, also waiting for some sudden thing to happen. The dark passage
was an ante-chamber to some event: Coryndon's tingling nerves told him
that; and he steadied himself, holding in his imagination in a close,
resolute grip.

He had no way of judging the time that passed, but he guessed that it
seemed longer to him than it possibly coul