ts for me. It would be known as fire is known when the
forest is dry. To-morrow or next day, if the police are gone, my little
house will be open again." He spoke the words with deep emphasis.

"Get out," said Joicey, turning away his head.

Leh Shin looked at him with a sudden, oblique glance like the flash of a
knife.

"Speak no more, Lord of men and elephants; the _Durwan_ is now outside
the door, and he listens."

"Good-night," said Joicey loudly, and he clicked off the light and went
to bed.

If the darkness was close in the large houses of the Cantonment, it was
shut into the very essence of itself in the curio shop in Paradise
Street. It hid the carved devils from one another, it obliterated the
stone monsters that no one ever bought, and which had grown to belong to
the shop itself; it dropped its black veil over the green dragons, and
the china ladies, and the silver bowls and the little ivories, hiding
everything out of sight; but it did not hide the figure outside in the
street. The little man, with his pointed headdress and short jacket, had
the clear darkness all to himself. He was just as polite by night as he
was by day, and he bowed and ushered imaginary buyers up the stone steps
with the same perpetual civility, and the same unceasing smile, that
bagged out his varnished cheeks into joviality.

Dark as it was inside the shop, it must have been darker along the
rat-burrows of stairs, and the loft-like rooms near the roof, but either
up above or down below, the scent of cassia and sandal-wood clung
everywhere inside the curio shop, smelling strongest around the glass
cases and bales of delicate silks.

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. As he placed his lamp on the floor, the light
threw odd shadows up the walls, turning that of Mhtoon Pah himself into
a grotesque and gigantic mass of darkness, and when he stooped and stood
erect it jumped with a sudden living spring.

Mhtoon Pah moved about the shop on light feet. He bent here and there to
examine some of the objects closely, with the manner and gesture of a
man who loves beautiful things for their own sakes as well