me back with dismay in his face and a story of loss upon loss. He had
compromised his master's credit to a heavy extent, and not only the
gains he had made but the principal was swept away into an awful chasm
where the grasping hands of creditors grabbed the whole of Leh Shin's
patrimony, claiming it under papers signed by his hand.

"It was then that light flowed in upon my darkness, and I saw the long
prepared evil that was the work of one man's hand." Leh Shin rose upon
his string bed and his voice was thin with rabid anger. "I caught him by
the throat and would have stabbed him with my knife, but he, being a
younger man than I, threw me off from him, and, when he made me answer,
I saw my foe of many years stand to render his account to me. '_Thou_,
to call me thief,' said he, 'who robbed me of my wife and cheated me of
my son.'"

After that, poverty and ruin drove him slowly from his house outside
Mangadone to the shelter of the shop in Paradise Street, and from there,
at length, to the burrow in the Colonnade. The bitterness of his own
fall was great enough in itself to harden the heart of any man, but it
was doubled by the story of the years that followed. Slowly, and without
calling too evident attention to himself, Mhtoon Pah began to prosper.
He opened a booth first, where he sat and cursed Leh Shin whenever he
passed, saying loudly that he had ruined him and swindled him out of all
his little store, that by hard work and attention to business he had
collected.

From the booth, just as Leh Shin left Paradise Street, Mhtoon Pah
progressed to a small unpretentious shop, and a year later he moved
again, as though inspired by a spirit of malice, into the very premises
where Leh Shin had first employed him as a clerk. That day Leh Shin went
to his Joss and swore vengeance, though how his vengeance could be
worked into fact was more than his opium-muddled brain could conceive.
Vengeance was his dream by night, his one concentrated thought by day,
and he came no nearer to any hope of fulfilling it. Mhtoon Pah, wealthy
and respected; Mhtoon Pah, the builder of shrines; Mhtoon Pah, who spoke
with high Sahibs and had the ear of the Head of the Police himself, and
Leh Shin clad in ragged clothes, and only able to keep his hungry soul
in his body by means of his opium traffic, how could he strike at his
foe's prosperity? His hate glared out of his eyes as he panted, stopping
to draw breath at the end of his account.

H