He leaned against an outer pillar for support, and gradually the noise of the street drew him back again to reality and to the solid facts of life once more.  He had been badly scared, for in some cases when nothing that can be expressed in words takes place, an infinitely greater thing, that no words can express, has occurred mentally.  To Leh Shin’s bewildered mind it was clear that he had actually felt a Joss breathe upon him, and that he had heard its footsteps follow him across the marble floor; the Joss who had shaken the curtains and extinguished the candles.

Still bewildered, Leh Shin crossed the courtyard and sat down on the kerb; his head swam and he felt along his legs with shaking hands.  A belated fruit seller went by, and he bought a handful of dates, stuck on a small rod and looking like immense beetles, and as he ate his confidence in life gradually returned.  The Joss was at a safe distance in his house and there was the street to give courage to his heart; the street where men walked safe and secure, and where a worse fear than the fear of death did not prowl secretly.

After a little while, he got up from the stifling dust and walked slowly on.  The streets flared with lights and the gold letters painted large on signboards in huge Chinese characters shone out, making a brave show.  There were open restaurants where he could have gone in, and there were houses of entertainment, hung with paper lanterns, that invited passers with a sound of music, but Leh Shin continued his mechanical walk, having another purpose in his mind.

He turned out of the lighted glare of the shops and struck along a back alley, where one street lamp gave the sole illumination, and stopping at a low, arched door cut deep in a wall, he knocked and was admitted.  Inside the entrance was another door heavily clamped with iron, which gave admission down a long, narrow passage to a room beyond.  It was a small room, not unlike a prison, with heavy iron bars against the corridors, and it was quite bare of furniture except for two deal tables, around which a crowd of men stood playing for money with impassive faces and greedy, grasping hands.  There was no mixture of race among the men who gambled; they were all Chinese, most of them clad in indigo-blue trousers and tight vests, though some of them wore white shirts and rakish straw hats.  The young men had close-clipped hair and looked like clever bull-terriers, but the older men wore long pigtails wound round their heads in black, rope-like coils.  The noise of dominoes thrown out by the man who held the bank and the rattle of dice were almost the only sounds in the room.

Under one table there was a small shrine, where a diminutive Joss presided over the fortunes of Chance, but Leh Shin did not go to it as was his usual habit before he began to play.  He even eyed it uneasily and kept at the further end of the room.