"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.