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.
"No," said Coryndon, touching the book, "I've been amusing myself in my own way," and he followed Hartley out of the room.
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.
Colonel Coryndon, his father, died just as the boy was leaving school, and left him a little money; just enough to keep him from the iron yoke of clerkship, and to allow of his waiting for what he wanted. Behind his dark eyes lived a brain that could concentrate with the grip of a vise upon any subject that interested him, and he puzzled his masters at his school. Coryndon was a curious mixture of imagination and strong common sense; few realize that it is only the imaginative mind that can see behind the curtain that divides life from life, and discern motives.