“Thou knowest, traitor,” said the Chinaman, his voice hoarse with passion, “what is dark unto others is clear unto me.  Have I not the tale of thy years written in the book of my mind?”

For a moment there was dead silence, and then a voice full of smooth malice and cruelty made answer to Leh Shin.

“Get thee to thy bed, fool.”

“I wait,” Leh Shin’s voice cracked and trembled, “and when the hour that is already written for thy destruction comes like the night-bat, it is I who shall proclaim it to thee; thus I have demanded, and thus it shall fall out.”

“O fruitful boaster, O friend of many years, thy words cause me great mirth.  Get thee to thy kennel, lest I do indeed come forth and twist thy vulture’s neck.”

A laugh of scorn was the only response to Mhtoon Pah’s threat, and the Chinaman turned and came down the steps.

“Alms, alms,” whined a sleepy voice.  “The poor are the children of the Holy One.  I am blind and I know not the faces of men.  Alms, alms, that thy merit may be written in the book.”

“Ask of him that is in that house,” said Leh Shin, pointing to the curio shop.  “Strike him with thy pestilence that his fatness fall from him and his bones melt, and I will give thee golden rewards.”

The secret passion of the words was so intense that the beggar was silenced, and Leh Shin passed on.  He went from Paradise Street to a small burrow near the Colonnade, and turned into a mean house where the paper lantern still burned in token that the owners were awake.  It was quite clean inside, and divided into large cubicles.  In each cubicle was a table, covered with oilcloth, at the head of which was placed a red lacquer pillow and a little glass lamp that gave the only light needed in the long, low room.  On the tables lay Burmen and Chinamen, some rigid in drugged sleep, and some smoking immense pipes with small, cup-like receptacles that held the opium.  The proprietor was alert and wakeful as he flitted about, an American cigarette between his lips, in this strange garden of sleep.

“I am weary,” said Leh Shin.  “Let me rest here.”

“It is great honour,” replied the small, wizened old man, with the laugh.  “What of thine own house by the river?”

“My limbs fail me.  To-night my assistant supplies the needs of those who ask, for I had a business.”

“And I trust thy business hath prospered with thee?”

Leh Shin stretched himself out on a table near the door.

“I await the hour of prosperity,”—­he twisted a needle in the brown mass that was offered to him and held it over the lamp.  “Evil are the days of a life whilst an old grudge burns like hot charcoal in the heart.”

“It is even so,” agreed the proprietor, and he hurried away from the noose of talk that Leh Shin would have cast around him.

The beggar, having followed Leh Shin as far as the opium den, returned along the Colonnade and knocked at the door of the house where Shiraz waited anxiously for his master.