The world jests at the abstract presentment of vice.  From pulpits it appears clothed in attractive words and is spoken of as alluring; and, supported by the laughter of the idle and the stern belief of the righteous in its charms, man sees something gallant and forbidden in following its secret paths.  The abstract view has the charm and attraction of an impressionist picture, but once the curtain is down, and the witness stands out with a terrible pointing finger, the laughter of the world dies into silence, and the testimony of the preacher that vice is provided with unearthly beauty becomes a false statement, and man is conscious only of the degradation of his own soul.

Coryndon left the room noiselessly and returned up the steps, along the corridor and down the stone flight that led into the subsiding heat of the late afternoon.  The young man with the smooth, affable manner wheeled a bicycle out of a far corner, and smiled pleasantly at Coryndon.

“You saw the Manager, and got what you wanted?”

“I saw him, and got even more than I wanted,” said Coryndon, with conviction.

Things like this puzzled the dream side of his nature and left him exhausted.  The gathering passion of rage in Joicey’s eyes had not touched him, but the memory of the big, bull-dog, defiant man huddled on the low chair, his arm over his face, was a memory that spoke of other things than what he had come there to discover; the terrible things that are behind life and that have power over it.  He had to collect himself with definite force, as a child’s attention is recalled to a lesson-book.

“He has cleared Leh Shin,” he said to himself, and at first exactly all that the words meant was not clear to his mind.  Joicey had cleared the Chinaman of complicity, and had knocked the whole structure of carefully selected evidence away with a few words.

Coryndon was back in Hartley’s bungalow with this to consider; and it left him in a strange place, miles from any conclusion.  He had sighted the end of his labours, seen the reward of his long secret watchfulness, and now they had withdrawn again beyond his grasp.  Heath had seen Absalom with the Chinaman’s assistant.  Joicey, whose evidence marked a later hour than that of Heath, had seen him alone, and the solitary figure of the small boy hurrying into the dark was the last record that indicated the way he had gone.

Nothing connected itself with the picture as Coryndon sat brooding over it, and then gradually his mind cleared and the confusion of the destruction of his carefully worked-out plan departed from his brain like a wind-blown cloud.  There was a link, and his sensitive fine fingers caught it suddenly, the very shock of contact sending the blood into his cheeks.

The picture was clear now.  Absalom, a little white-clad figure, slim, eager and dutiful, hurried into the shadows of night, but Coryndon was at his heels this time.  The clue was so tiny, so infinitesimal, that it took the eye of a man trained to the last inch in the habit of seeing everything to notice it, but it did not escape Coryndon.