ma and the part of Francis Heath, Priest
in Holy Orders. How they had both stood the test of detection he did not
trouble to analyse. "Detection" is a nasty word, with a nasty sound in
it, and no one likes it well enough to brood over all it exactly means.

Coryndon was sufficiently an observer of men and life to feel grateful
to Heath, because he had seen something for a short moment as he studied
the clergyman that dwells afterwards in the mind, like a stream of
moonlight lying over a tranquil sea. Hidden things, in his experience,
were seldom things of beauty, and yet he had come upon one fair place
in the whole puzzling and tangled story collected round the
disappearance of the Christian boy Absalom.

Mrs. Wilder and Heath were both accounted for and deleted from the list
of names indelibly inscribed in his mental book; but one fact that was
sufficiently weighty had been added to what was still involved in doubt:
the fact that Heath had seen the boy in company with Leh Shin's
assistant.

Coryndon was subject to the ordinary prejudices of any man who makes
human personality a study, and he was more than half disposed to go back
to the Bazaar and hear whatever evidence Shiraz had been able to collect
during his absence. Two reasons prevented his doing this. One was that
he would have to wait until it was dark enough to leave Hartley's
bungalow without being watched, and possibly followed, and the other
that there was still one name on the list that required attention, and
he began to feel that it required immediate attention. A toss of a coin
lay between which course he should adopt first, and he sat very still to
consider the thing carefully.

In the service of which he was a member, he had learnt that much depends
upon getting facts in their chronological order, and that if there is
the least disunion in the fusing of events, deduction may hammer its
head eternally against a stone wall. He did not know positively that Leh
Shin had decoyed the boy away by means of his assistant, but he was
inclined to believe that such was the case. The blood-stained rag looked
like a piece of impudent bravado more than likely to have emanated from
the brain of the young Chinaman. His mental fingers opened to catch Leh
Shin and lay hold on him, but they unclosed again, and Coryndon felt
about him in the darkness that separates mind from mind. He knew the
pitfall that a too evident chain of circumstances digs for the unwary,
and h