He threw open his windows and sat with the air playing on his face, and his thoughts circled round and round the central idea.  Absalom was missing, and the Rev. Francis Heath had behaved in a way that led him to believe that he knew a great deal more than he cared to say, and Hartley brooded over the subject until he grew drowsy and went upstairs to bed.

III

INDICATES A STANDPOINT COMMONLY SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT THE PRINCIPLES OF THE JESUIT FATHERS

It was quite early the following morning when Hartley set out to take a stroll down Paradise Street, and from there to the Chinese quarter, where Leh Shin had a small shop in a colonnade running east and west.  The houses here were very different to the houses in Paradise Street.  The fronts were brightened with gilt, and green and red paint daubed the entrances.  Almost every third shop was a restaurant, and Hartley did not care to think of the sort of food that was cooked and eaten within.  Immense lanterns, that turned into coloured moons by night, but they were pale and dim by day, hung on the cross-beams inside the houses.

Some half-way down the colonnade, and deep in the odorous gloom, Leh Shin worked at nothing in particular, and sold devils as Mhtoon Pah sold them, but without the same success.  The door of his shop was closed, and Hartley rapped upon it several times before he received an answer; then a bolt was shot back, and Leh Shin’s long neck stretched itself out towards the officer.  He was a thin, gaunt figure, lean as the Plague, and his spare frame was clad in cheap black stuff that hung around him like the garments of Death itself.  Hartley drew back a step, for the smell of napi and onions is unpleasant even to the strongest of white men, and told Leh Shin to open the door wide as he wished to talk to him.  Leh Shin, with many owlish blinkings of his narrow eyes, asked Hartley to come inside.  The street was not a good place for talking, and Hartley followed him into the shop.

It was very dark within, and a dim light fell from high skylight windows, giving the shop something of the suggestion of a well.  Counters blocked it, making entrance a matter of single file, and, in the deep gloom at the back, two candles burned before a huge, ferocious-looking figure depicted on rice-paper and stuck against the wall.  It was hard to believe that it was day outside, so heavy was the darkness, and it was a few moments before Hartley’s eyes became accustomed to the sudden change.  Second-hand clothes hung on pegs around the room, and all kinds of articles were jumbled together regardless of their nature.  On the floor was a litter of silk and silver goods, boxes, broken portmanteaux, ropes, baskets, and on the counter nearest the door a tiny silver cage of beautiful workmanship inhabited by a tiny golden bird with ruby eyes.