“Coryndon,” said Hartley again.  “Of all men on earth I wanted to see you most.  You’ve done what you always do, come in the ‘nick.’”

Coryndon smiled, a languid, half-amused gleam of mirth.

“I am only passing through, my job is finished.”

“But you’ll stay for a bit?”

“You said just now that I was here in the ‘nick’; if the nick is interesting, I’ll see.”

“I’ll go and arrange about your rooms,” said Hartley, and he appeared twice his normal size beside his guest, as a St. Bernard might look standing by a greyhound.  “We will talk afterwards.”

Coryndon watched him go out without change of expression, and, sliding back into his chair, took up his book again.

    “They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
    The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.”

Coryndon leaned back and half closed his eyes; the words seemed potent, as with a spell, and he called up a vision of the forsaken Palace where wild things lived and where revels were long forgotten—­solitude and ruin that no one ever crossed to explore or to see—­with the eyes of a man who can rebuild a mighty past.  Solitude in the halls and marble stairways, ruin of time in the fretted screens, and broken cisterns holding nothing but dry earth.  Nothing there now but the lion and the lizard, not even the ghost of a light footfall, or the tinkle of glass bangles on a rounded arm.

Coryndon had almost forgotten Hartley when he came back, flushed and pleased, and full of a host’s anxiety about his guest’s welfare.

“I hope you haven’t been bored?”

“No,” said Coryndon, touching the book, “I’ve been amusing myself in my own way,” and he followed Hartley out of the room.

XI

SHOWS HOW THE “WHISPER FROM THE DAWN OF LIFE” ENABLES CORYNDON TO TAKE THE DRIFTING THREADS BETWEEN HIS FINGERS

Very probably Hartley believed that he knew “all about” Coryndon; he knew at least, that the Government of India looked upon him as the best man they had to unravel the most intricate case that murder or forgery, coining or fraud of any sort, could tangle into mysterious knots.  Coryndon had intuition and patience, and once he undertook a case he followed it through to the ultimate conclusion; and so it was that Coryndon stood alone, a department in himself, possibly aided by the police and the shadower, but capable of discovering anything, once he bent his mind to the business of elucidation.

Beyond the fact that he had been born somewhere in a jungle clearing in Upper Burma, and that at ten years old he had gone to India to a school in the Hills, then had vanished for years to reappear in the service of the Government, his story was not known to anyone except himself.  No one doubted that he had “a touch of the country” in his blood.  It displayed itself in unmistakable physical traits, and his knowledge of its many tongues and languages was the knowledge that first made him realize that his future career lay in India.