ted,
and he hurried in, a light of pleasure in his blue eyes.

Near the lamp, a book of verses open on his knee, sat Hartley's
unexpected guest. He was slim, dark, and vital, but where his arresting
note of vitality lay would have been hard to explain. No one can tell
exactly what it is that marks one man as a courageous man, and another
as a coward, and yet, without need of any test, these things may be
known and judged beforehand. The man whose eyes followed the lines:

"They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep"--

was as distinctive as he well could be, and yet his face was not
expressive. His dark, narrow eyes were dull, and his finely-cut features
small and perfect, rather than bold and strong; his long hands were the
hands of a woman more than those of a man, and his figure was slight to
boyishness.

When Hartley let his full joy express itself in husky, cheery words of
surprise, his visitor said very little, but what he did say was spoken
in a pleasant, low voice.

"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