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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.
Even when he drew away, he listened with avidity as the Burman continued to pour forth his story. He had a friend in the household of Hartley Sahib, so he told Leh Shin, a friend who had sensitive ears and had heard much; had heard in fact the whole story of the stained rag, and of Mhtoon Pah's wild appeal for justice against the Chinaman.
His whole shop was a fountain of colour, and he was not unworthy of it in his silk petticoat. A ray of sunlight fell in through the door and touched a few threads of gold in the coat as Mhtoon Pah hung it up to good advantage, and turned to see a customer come in. It was the Rev. Francis Heath; and Mhtoon Pah's face fell.
The clergyman's evidence was worth nothing at all, except to prove that the boy had left Mhtoon Pah's shop at the time mentioned, and Mhtoon Pah explained that the "private business" was to buy a gold lacquer bowl desired by Mrs. Wilder, who had come to the shop a day or two before and given the order.
"Put that down," said Hartley. Mhtoon Pah's very agony of desire to find the boy was almost disgusting, and he turned away from the sight. "There is no use your staying here, and no use your coming, unless there is more of this devil's work," he pointed to the blood-stained cloth. "Leave the thing here, and I will see what the doctors have to say about it." "Thakin, Thakin," said Mhtoon Pah.
She treated the question with scant ceremony, and remarked upon the fact that the night had been hot, and that everyone had felt it. "I've got an excellent reason for remembering the date," said Hartley reflectively. "By the way, wasn't Absalom, old Mhtoon Pah's assistant, once a dressing-boy or something in your establishment?"
The face altered. Sometimes it was Mhtoon Pah's pointing man, and what he pointed at was never clear. The mistiness bothered him horribly. The Durwan outside played on a wistful little flute, thinking that his master was asleep; he heard it, and it did not concern him; he was dead to all outward things just then, and the flute only added to the mystery of the dream that spun itself in his brain.
"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.
Mhtoon Pah's Durwan slept across the doorway, and was therefore the only object for the attention of the little man, and likewise, therefore, he did not point to his master, who came in, in the dead, heavy hours before dawn. He could not have been far; there was hardly any dust on his red velvet slippers, and he brushed what there was from them with a careful hand.
The moon that was to have shone on Mhtoon Pah's feast rose in a yellow ring, and clouds came up, hazy, gaudy clouds that dimmed its light and made the shadows in the silent streets dense and heavy. Usually there was a police guard at the corner where Paradise Street met the Colonnade, but that night Hartley considered the police would be more necessary in the neighbourhood of the Pagoda.