house in Paradise Street stood a good chance of being burned to the ground.  If this “accident” happened, Shiraz would know exactly whose hand it was that lighted the match.  It was all part of an organized scheme, and though he did not know how Coryndon would bring the facts home, fitting each man with his share, like a second skin to his body, he felt satisfied that he had provided the lump of clay for the skilled potter to mould into shape.

He took off his turban, and lay down on his carpet.  The day was still hot, and the drowsy afternoon outside his closed windows blinked and stared through the hours, the glare intensifying the shadows under the trees and along the Colonnade.  The soda-water and lemonade sellers in their small booths drove a roaring trade as they packed the aquamarine-green bottles in blocks of dirty ice to keep the frizzling drink cool; and the cawing of marauding crows and the cackle of fowl blended with the shouting of drivers and sellers of wares, who heeded not the staring heat of the sun.

After the emotion of telling his tale, Leh Shin slept in his own small box of darkness, and, in the rich curio shop in Paradise Street, Mhtoon Pah leaned on an embroidered pillow with closed eyes.  The stream of life flowed slowly and softly through the hours when only the poor have need to work; soft as the current of a full tide that slides between wide banks, and soft as sleep, or fate, or the destiny which no man can hope to escape.

XX

CRAVEN JOICEY, THE BANKER, IS FACED BY A MAN WITH A WHIP IN HIS HAND, AND CORYNDON FINDS A CLUE

It is a matter of universal belief that a woman’s most alluring quality is her mystery, and Coryndon, no lover of women, was absorbed in the study of mystery without a woman.

He had eliminated the woman.

In his mind he cast Mrs. Wilder upon one side, as March throws February to the fag end of winter, and rushes on to meet the primrose girl bringing spring in her wake.  He had dealt simultaneously with Mrs. Wilder’s little part in the drama and the part of Francis Heath, Priest in Holy Orders.  How they had both stood the test of detection he did not trouble to analyse.  “Detection” is a nasty word, with a nasty sound in it, and no one likes it well enough to brood over all it exactly means.

Coryndon was sufficiently an observer of men and life to feel grateful to Heath, because he had seen something for a short moment as he studied the clergyman that dwells afterwards in the mind, like a stream of moonlight lying over a tranquil sea.  Hidden things, in his experience, were seldom things of beauty, and yet he had come upon one fair place in the whole puzzling and tangled story collected round the disappearance of the Christian boy Absalom.

Mrs. Wilder and Heath were both accounted for and deleted from the list of names indelibly inscribed in his mental book; but one fact that was sufficiently weighty had been added to what was still involved in doubt:  the fact that Heath had seen the boy in company with Leh Shin’s assistant.