ed
one of the narrow streets that was not even a cross-street, but an
alley, running to a bag's end, with balconies, green railings and
narcissi taking the sun.

A slant-eyed baby in a mauve blouse stared after them; and a white face
so poisoned in its badness that it gave Flora a start, peered at them
from across the street. It made her shrink a little behind Harry's broad
shoulder and take hold of his arm. The mere touch of that arm was
security. His big presence, moving agilely beside her, seemed to fill
the street with its strength, as if, by merely flinging out his arms,
Samson-like, he could burst the dark walls asunder.

In the middle of the block, sunk a little back from the fronts of the
others, the goldsmith's shop showed a single, filmed window; and the
pale glow through it proclaimed that the worker in metals preferred
another light to the sun's. The threshold was worn to a hollow that
surprised the foot; and the interior into which it led them gloomed so
suddenly around them after the broad sunlight, that it was a moment
before they made out the little man behind the counter, sitting hunched
up on a high stool.

"Hullo, Joe," said Harry, in the same voice that hailed his friends on
the street-corners; but the goldsmith only nodded like a nodding
mandarin, as if, without looking up, he took them in and sensed their
errand. He wore a round, blue Chinese cap drawn over his crown; a pair
of strange goggles like a mask over his eyes, and his little body seemed
to poise as lightly on his high stool as a wisp, as if there were no
more flesh in it than in his long, dry fingers that so marvelously
manipulated the metal. Save for that glitter of gold on his glass plate,
and the grin of a lighted brazier, all was dark, discolored and
cluttered.

And the way Harry bloomed upon this background of dubious antiquity! He
leaned on the little counter, which creaked under his weight, in his
big, fresh coat, with his clear, fresh face bent above the shallow tray
of trinkets--doubtful jades, dim-eyed rings, dull clasps and coins--his
large, fastidious finger poked among. He was the one vital thing in the
shop.

Over everything else was spread a dimness of age like dust. It enveloped
the little man behind the counter, not with the frailness that belongs
to human age, but with that weathered, polished hardness which time
brings to antiques of wood and metal. Indeed, he appeared so like a
carved idol in a curio shop that F