As I paced slowly along the pavement toward that lighted window, my heart was beating far from normally, and I cursed the folly which, despite all, refused to die, but lingered on, poisoning my life. Comparative quiet reigned in Museum Street, at no time a busy thoroughfare, and, excepting another shop at the Museum end, commercial activities had ceased there. The door of a block of residential chambers almost immediately opposite to the shop which was my objective, threw out a beam of light across the pavement; not more than two or three people were visible upon either side of the street. I turned the knob of the door and entered the shop. The same dark and immobile individual whom I had seen before, and whose nationality defied conjecture, came out from the curtained doorway at the back to greet me. "Good evening, sir," he said monotonously, with a slight inclination of the head; "is there anything which you desire to inspect?" "I merely wish to take a look round," I replied. "I have no particular item in view." The shopman inclined his head again, swept a yellow hand comprehensively about, as if to include the entire stock, and seated himself on a chair behind the counter. I lighted a cigarette with such an air of nonchalance as I could summon to the operation, and began casually to inspect the varied articles of _virtu_ loading the shelves and tables about me. I am bound to confess that I retain no one definite impression of this tour. Vases I handled, statuettes, Egyptian scarabs, bead necklaces, illuminated missals, portfolios of old prints, jade ornaments, bronzes, fragments of rare lace, early printed books, Assyrian tablets, daggers, Roman rings, and a hundred other curiosities, leisurely, and I trust with apparent interest, yet without forming the slightest impression respecting any one of them. Probably I employed myself in this way for half an hour or more, and whilst my hands busied themselves among the stock of J. Salaman, my mind was occupied entirely elsewhere. Furtively I was studying the shopman himself, a human presentment of a Chinese idol; I was listening and watching: especially I was watching the curtained doorway at the back of the shop. "We close at about this time, sir," the man interrupted me, speaking in the emotionless, monotonous voice which I had noted before. I replaced upon the glass counter a little Sekhet boat, carved in wood and highly coloured, and glanced up with a start. Truly my methods were amateurish; I had learnt nothing; I was unlikely to learn anything. I wondered how Nayland Smith would have conducted such an inquiry, and I racked my brains for some means of penetrating into the recesses of the establishment. Indeed I had been seeking such a plan for the past half an hour, but my mind had proved incapable of suggesting one.