“Searched,” cried the Chinaman, “as the pocket of a coat.  No corner left that was not peered into, no house that was not ransacked.”  The Chinaman’s voice quivered with passion, and his whole body shook and trembled.

Life flowed back into its accustomed current, and nearly a year passed before the next trouble came upon Leh Shin.  Mhtoon Pah came back from a prolonged journey that had necessitated his going to Hong-Kong, and he came back with dismay in his face and a story of loss upon loss.  He had compromised his master’s credit to a heavy extent, and not only the gains he had made but the principal was swept away into an awful chasm where the grasping hands of creditors grabbed the whole of Leh Shin’s patrimony, claiming it under papers signed by his hand.

“It was then that light flowed in upon my darkness, and I saw the long prepared evil that was the work of one man’s hand.”  Leh Shin rose upon his string bed and his voice was thin with rabid anger.  “I caught him by the throat and would have stabbed him with my knife, but he, being a younger man than I, threw me off from him, and, when he made me answer, I saw my foe of many years stand to render his account to me. ’Thou, to call me thief,’ said he, ’who robbed me of my wife and cheated me of my son.’”

After that, poverty and ruin drove him slowly from his house outside Mangadone to the shelter of the shop in Paradise Street, and from there, at length, to the burrow in the Colonnade.  The bitterness of his own fall was great enough in itself to harden the heart of any man, but it was doubled by the story of the years that followed.  Slowly, and without calling too evident attention to himself, Mhtoon Pah began to prosper.  He opened a booth first, where he sat and cursed Leh Shin whenever he passed, saying loudly that he had ruined him and swindled him out of all his little store, that by hard work and attention to business he had collected.

From the booth, just as Leh Shin left Paradise Street, Mhtoon Pah progressed to a small unpretentious shop, and a year later he moved again, as though inspired by a spirit of malice, into the very premises where Leh Shin had first employed him as a clerk.  That day Leh Shin went to his Joss and swore vengeance, though how his vengeance could be worked into fact was more than his opium-muddled brain could conceive.  Vengeance was his dream by night, his one concentrated thought by day, and he came no nearer to any hope of fulfilling it.  Mhtoon Pah, wealthy and respected; Mhtoon Pah, the builder of shrines; Mhtoon Pah, who spoke with high Sahibs and had the ear of the Head of the Police himself, and Leh Shin clad in ragged clothes, and only able to keep his hungry soul in his body by means of his opium traffic, how could he strike at his foe’s prosperity?  His hate glared out of his eyes as he panted, stopping to draw breath at the end of his account.