A Frenchman has just demonstrated that by a judicious application of galvanism to the heart and salt water to the veins any average corpse can be revived." Evidently Furneaux was enjoying himself.

He sat there, absorbing new impressions and irradiating scraps of irrelevant knowledge in a way that would have been full of significance to Winter had he been present.
Furneaux was never so mercurial, never so ready to jump from one subject to another, as when his subtle brain was working at high pressure.
He actually reveled in a crime which lay on the borderland of the exotic and the grotesque.

Like the French philosopher in Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination," the savant who read his newspaper in a dingy Paris room, and solved by sheer force of intellect extraordinary criminal problems which baffled the shrewdest official minds, he felt in relation to this particular tragedy that he required only to be brought in touch with certain contingent forces bound up with it--Forbes, for instance, and, in a minor degree, Theydon--and in due course he would be able to go forth and find the master wrongdoer.
Suddenly the millionaire seemed to cast off the cloak of despair which clogged his energies and impaired his brilliant intellect.

He rose to his feet and involuntarily squared his shoulders.
"Surely we are wasting valuable hours which should be given to action," he cried.

"I am going to the city and shall arrange for a prolonged absence from my office.