Only once, when she ordered a bowl of flowers removed from the table, did their mistress address either of them.

Conversation after the first few amenities speedily became almost a monologue.

One man talked whilst the others listened, and the man who talked was Oliver Hilditch.

He possessed the rare gift of imparting colour and actuality in a few phrases to the strange places of which he spoke, of bringing the very thrill of strange happenings into the shadowy room.

It seemed that there was scarcely a country of the world which he had not visited, a country, that is to say, where men congregate, for he admitted from the first that he was a city worshipper, that the empty places possessed no charm for him.
"I am not even a sportsman," he confessed once, half apologetically, in reply to a question from his guest.