Mhtoon Pah, the wealthy curio dealer, the shrine builder, the friend of the powerful, hung from a beam across the centre of the low ceiling, and Mhtoon Pah was dead, strangled in a fine, silk scarf.  Fine, strong silk made only by certain lake-dwellers in a wild place just across the Shan frontier.

Perhaps the destiny which Shiraz believed a man may not escape, be he as fleet as a flying stag, had caught up with him, and it was not without reason that the image had pointed at something not there years ago, not there when youth was there, and hope and love, and when Leh Shin had lived and been happy there, but to come, certainly and surely to come.

* * * * *

Hartley and Coryndon sat long over their breakfast.  Coryndon’s face was strained and tired, and heavy lines of fatigue were marked under his dark eyes.

“The boy was not in a condition to give any lucid explanation when I brought him back,” said Hartley, “so I left him until we could both hear his story together.”  He called to his Bearer and gave instructions for the boy to be brought in.

Coryndon nodded silently; his eyes lit up with interest and all his listlessness vanished as he watched the door.

Following Hartley’s Bearer, a small, thin boy came into the room, dressed in a white suit, with a tight white pugaree folded round his head.  He shrank nervously at every sound, and when he salaamed to Hartley and Coryndon his face worked as though he was going to burst into tears.

“You have nothing to be afraid of,” said Hartley kindly.  “Just tell the whole truth, and explain how it was that you came to be shut up in the curio shop.”

The boy’s eyes grew less terrified, and he began to speak in a low, mumbling voice.  He began in the middle of the account, and Hartley gently but firmly pushed him back to the beginning.

“Start with the story of the lacquer bowl,” he said, talking very slowly and clearly.  “We want to hear what happened about that first.”

The mention of the subject of lacquer threw Absalom once more into a state of panic, but as his story progressed he became more sure of himself, and looked up, forgetting his fear in the excitement of having a really remarkable story to tell, that was listened to by Sahibs with intent interest.

In tearful, stumbling words he admitted that he and Leh Shin’s assistant had been friends, and that those evil communications that corrupt not only good manners but good morals had worked with disastrous results upon him.  With his brown knuckles to his protruding eyes, he admitted, further, that he had stolen the gold lacquer bowl from the drugged and drunken seaman, and that Leh Shin’s assistant had plundered him of more than half his rightful share of the profit.  What remained over, he protested, he intended to give to the “Missen,” testifying to the fact that his conscience was causing him uneasiness and that his natural superstition made him adopt means, not unknown to other financiers, of squaring things by a donation to a charitable object.