"No. No like. You got something else—something nice?"
"No." It was like a door closed in the face of their hope—that falling inflection, that blank of vacuity that settled over his face, and his whole drooping figure. He seemed to be only mutely awaiting their immediate departure to climb back again on his high stool. But Harry still leaned on the counter and grinned ingratiatingly. "Oh, Joe, you good flen'. You got something pretty—maybe?"
The curtain of vacuity parted just a crack—let through a gleam of intense intelligence. "Maybe." The goldsmith chuckled deeply, as if Harry had unwittingly perpetrated some joke—some particularly clever conjurer's trick. He sidled out behind the counter, past the grinning brazier, and shuffled into the back of the shop where he opened a door.
Flora had expected a cupboard, but the vista it gave upon was a long, black, incredibly narrow passage, that stretched away into gloom with all the suggestion of distance of a road going over a horizon. Down this the goldsmith went, with his straw slippers clapping on his heels, until his small figure merged in the gloom and presently disappeared altogether, and only the faint flipper-flap of his slippers came back growing more and more distant to them, and finally dying into silence. In the stillness that followed while they waited they could hear each other breathe. The little shop with the water-stained walls and the ancient odor—ancient as the empire of China—inclosed them like a spell cast around them by a vanishing enchanter to hold them there mute until his returning. They did not look at each other, but rather at the glowing brazier, at the gold on the glass plates, at the forms of people passing in the street, moving palely across the dim window pane, as distant to Flora's eye as though they moved in another world. Then came the flipper-flap of the goldsmith's slippers returning. The sound snapped their tension, and Harry laughed.
"Lord knows how far he went to get it!"
"Across the street?" Flora wondered.
"Or under it. And it won't be worth two bits when it gets here." He peered at the little man coming toward them down the passage, flapping and shuffling, and carrying, held before him in both hands, a square, deep little box.
It was a worn, nondescript box that he set down before them, but the jealous way he had carried it had suggested treasure, and Flora leaned eagerly forward as he raised the cover, half expecting the blaze of a jewel-case. She saw at first only dull shanks of metal tumbled one upon the other. But, after a moment's peering, between them she caught gleams of veritable light. Her fingers went in to retrieve a hoop of heavy silver, in the midst of which was sunk a flawed topaz. She admired a moment the play of light over the imperfection.
"But this isn't Chinese," she objected, turning her surprise on Harry.
"Lots of 'em aren't. These men glean everywhere. That's pretty." He held up a little circle of discolored but lusterful pearls—let it fall again, since it was worth only a glance. He leaned on the counter, indifferent to urge where value seemed so slight. He seemed amused at Flora's enthusiasm for clouded opals.