lora was a little startled to find
that he was looking at her. Chinamen had always seemed to her blank
automatons; but this one looked keenly, pointedly, as if he personally
took note. She told herself whimsically that perhaps it was his
extraordinary glasses that gave point to that expression; and presently
when he took them off she was surprised to see it seemed verily true.
His little physiognomy had no more expression than a withered nut. But
there was something about it more disturbing than its vanishing
intelligence, something unexpected, and out of harmony with the rest of
him, yet so illusive that, flit over him as her eye would, she failed to
find it.

"Harry," she murmured to Cressy, who was still stirring the contents of
the box with a disdainful forefinger, "this little man gives me the
shivers."

"Old Joe?" Harry smiled indulgently. "He's a queer customer. Been quite
a figurehead in Chinatown for twenty years. Say, Joe, heap bad!" and
with the back of his hand he flicked the tray away from him.

The little man undoubled his knees and descended the stool. He stood
breast-high behind the counter. He dropped a lack-luster eye to the box.
"Velly nice," he murmured with vague, falling inflection.

"Oh, rotten!" Harry laughed at him.

"You no like?"

"No. No like. You got something else--something nice?"

"No." It was like a door closed in the face of their hope--that falling
inflection, that blank of vacuity that settled over his face, and his
whole drooping figure. He seemed to be only mutely awaiting their
immediate departure to climb back again on his high stool. But Harry
still leaned on the counter and grinned ingratiatingly. "Oh, Joe, you
good flen'. You got something pretty--maybe?"

The curtain of vacuity parted just a crack--let through a gleam of
intense intelligence. "Maybe." The goldsmith chuckled deeply, as if
Harry had unwittingly perpetrated some joke--some particularly clever
conjurer's trick. He sidled out behind the counter, past the grinning
brazier, and shuffled into the back of the shop where he opened a door.

Flora had expected a cupboard, but the vista it gave upon was a long,
black, incredibly narrow passage, that stretched away into gloom with
all the suggestion of distance of a road going over a horizon. Down this
the goldsmith went, with his straw slippers clapping on his heels, until
his small figure merged in the gloom and presently disappeared
altogether, and only the fa