Mhtoon Pah would have been at the point where a man’s life touches sublimity, but for one thing.  The words of Leh Shin echoed in his ears over all the applause and adulation.

“It is in my thought, friend, to make my peace.  On the night of the full moon I am minded to do so.”

The moon riding clear of clouds, shone out over the concourse of men and women.  Anywhere among them all might be Leh Shin, the needy Chinaman, and gripping his large hands into fists, Mhtoon Pah watched for him and expected him, but watch as he might, he did not come, neither was there any sign of him among all the crowd of faces that passed and repassed before the new shrine.

XXIII

DEMONSTRATES THE TRUTH OF THE AXIOM THAT “THE UNEXPECTED ALWAYS HAPPENS”

At the time when Mhtoon Pah was standing in the centre of a gazing group before the new shrine, and trying to forget that nothing except the news of Leh Shin’s hanging would give him real satisfaction, the Chinaman, accompanied by the Burman, slipped up the channel of gloom under the Colonnade and made his way into Paradise Street.

The Burman walked with an easy unconscious step, but Leh Shin crept close to the wall and started when he passed a sleeping form in a doorway.  Night fears and that trembling anxiety that comes when fulfilment is close at hand were upon him.  He knew that the point in view was to effect an entrance into the curio shop, the threshold of which he had not crossed since his last black hour of misfortune had struck and he had gone out a beggar.

Everything in his life lay on the other side of the shop door; all his happy, prosperous, careless days, all the good years.  Every one of them was stored there just as surely as Mhtoon Pah’s ivories and carved screens and silks were stored safe against the encroachment of damp and must.  His old self might even be somewhere in the silent house, and it takes a special quality of courage for a man to return and walk through a doorway into the long past.  For the first time for years he remembered how he had brought his little son into the shop, and how the child had laughed and crowed at the sight of amber and crystal chains.

Even Mhtoon Pah grew dim in his mind, and he dallied with the forgotten memories as he stood shaking in an archway watching the Burman cross the street.  Insensibly the Burman’s mania had waned in the last few hours, and he had grown silent and preoccupied, a fact that escaped Leh Shin’s notice.  His owl eyes blinked with the strain of staring through the wavering light, and his memories strove with him as though in physical combat.  Mhtoon Pah was no longer in the house, and instead of his shadow another influence seemed to brood there, something that called to Leh Shin, but not with the wild cry of hate.  Before the days of still greater affluence Leh Shin had lived there with his little Burmese wife.