A man with a grievance, however silent he may be by nature, is, generally speaking, voluble upon the subject of his wrongs, real or imaginary; but a man with a grudge is intrinsically different.  An old grudge or an old hate are silent things, because they have deep roots and do not require attention, and it is only in flashes of sudden feeling, or when the means to the end is in view, that the man with a grudge reveals details and tells his story.  Shiraz paid several visits to, and spent some time in the shop of, Leh Shin before he arrived at what he wanted to know.

He went also to Mhtoon Pah’s shop, but came away without discovering anything.  Into the ears of Hartley, Head of the Police, the Burman raged and screamed his passionate hate, because he believed it promoted his object; but to the Punjabi he was smooth and complaisant, and refused to be drawn into any admission.  Leh Shin, the Chinaman, was Bazaar dust to his dignity, and he knew naught of him, save only that the man had an evil name earned by evil deeds, and Shiraz, who was as crafty as Mhtoon Pah, saw that he had come to a “no thoroughfare” and turned his wits towards Leh Shin.

Little by little, and without any apparent motive, he worked the Chinaman up to the point where silence is agony, and at last, as a river in flood crashes over the mud-banks, the whole tale of his wrongs came bursting through his closed mouth, and with the sweat pouring down his yellow face he out it into words.

The meanest story receives something vital in its constitution when it is told with all the force and conviction of years of hatred behind the simple fact of expression, and the story that Leh Shin recounted to Shiraz was a mean story.  The Chinaman had the true Eastern capacity for remembering the least item in the long account that lay unsettled between himself and the Burman.  His memory was a safe in which the smallest fact connected with it was kept intact and his mind traversed an interminable road of detail.

The two men had begun life as friends.  The friendship between them dated back to the days when Leh Shin and Mhtoon Pah were small boys running together in the streets of Mangadone, and no antipathy that is a first instinct has ever the depth of root given to the bitterness that can spring from a breach in long friendship, and Leh Shin and Mhtoon Pah hated as only old friends ever do hate.

Leh Shin started in life with all the advantages that Mhtoon Pah lacked, and he appreciated the slavish friendship of the Burman, which grew with years.  Mhtoon Pah became a clerk on scanty pay in the employ of a rice firm, and Leh Shin, at his father’s death, became sole owner of the house in Paradise Street; no insignificant heritage, as it was stocked with a store of things that increased in value with age, and in the guise of his greatest friend Mhtoon Pah was made welcome at the shop whenever he had time to go there.  From his clerkship in the firm of