Leh Shin slid out again.  The passage was dark as pitch, but he knew every turn and twist of its windings, and he knew that it led down to the cellars below the house.  He was awake and alert now as Coryndon himself, and as he strained his ears he caught a sound.  He listened again with horrible eagerness, looked back into the shop and saw the stooping head going over every yard of a roll of fine silk faithfully; and then he gripped the knife under his belt and, feeling along the wall with his free hand, followed along the corridor.  Once only he glanced round and then the darkness of the corridor swallowed him from sight.

Coryndon, busy with the silk made by the lake-dwellers spread over his knees, knew nothing of Leh Shin’s disappearance.  The fever of chase was in his blood, and he threw the flimsy yards through his hands.  Nothing, nothing, and again nothing, and again—­he felt his heart swell with sudden, stifled excitement.  Under his hand was a three-cornered rent, a damaged piece where a patch rather larger than his palm had been roughly cut out.  His usually steady hand shook as he put the stained rag over it and fitted it into the place.

“Leh Shin,” he called, as he rose, but he called softly.

No sound answered his whisper, and he stiffened his body and listened.  He had been wrong.  There was a sound, but it did not come from inside the shop:  it was the slow footstep of a heavy man pausing to find a key.

Coryndon listened no longer.  He closed the door of the silk cupboard, bundled up the yards of silk in his arms and extinguishing the lamp darted behind a screen.  It was a heavy carved teak screen, inset with silk panels embroidered with a long spray of hanging wistaria on a dark yellow ground.  As he hid himself, he cursed his own stupidity.  In the excitement of his desire to enter the curio shop, he had forgotten to hamper the lock with pebbles.

After what seemed an age, the door opened slowly and Mhtoon Pah came in.  Something, he knew not what, had dragged him away from the Pagoda, and dragged him back to his shop.  His eyes looked mad and unnatural in the light of the lantern he held in his hand, and he shut the door and stood like a dog who scents danger, and stared round the room.  He walked to the silk cupboard and looked in through the glass panes, but did not open it or discover that it was unlocked.  He paced round the room, stopping before the screen, his eyes still reflecting his trouble of mind.

From behind the screen, Coryndon watched every stir he made; he saw the look on his face and noted Mhtoon Pah’s smallest movement.  There was no evidence of thieves, and yet suspicion made itself plain in every line of the curio dealer’s body.  At last, with a gasping sigh, he sat before the small figure of an alabaster Gaudama and stared at it with unwinking eyes.

“I shed no blood,” he said, in a low rattling voice.  “I shed no blood.  My hands are clean.”