supporting a frescoed
ceiling, and lighted by numerous bay windows opening on to the North
Sea, which was sparkling brightly in a brilliant October sunshine. The
thirty people comprised the whole of the hotel visitors, for in the year
1916 holiday seekers preferred some safer resort than a part of the
Norfolk coast which lay in the track of enemy airships seeking a way to
London.

Two nights before a Zeppelin had dropped a couple of bombs on the
Durrington front, and the majority of hotel visitors had departed by the
next morning's train, disregarding the proprietor's assurance that the
affair was a pure accident, a German oversight which was not likely to
happen again. Off the nervous ones went, and left the big hotel, the
long curved seafront, the miles of yellow sand, the high green
headlands, the best golf-links in the East of England, and all the other
attractions mentioned in the hotel advertisements, to a handful of
people, who were too nerve-proof, lazy, fatalistic, or indifferent to
bother about Zeppelins.

These thirty guests, scattered far and wide over the spacious isolation
of the breakfast-room, in twos and threes, and little groups, seemed,
with one exception, too engrossed in the solemn British rite of
beginning the day well with a good breakfast to bother their heads about
the conduct of the young man at the alcove table. They were, for the
most part, characteristic war-time holiday-makers: the men, obviously
above military age, in Norfolk tweeds or golf suits; two young officers
at a table by the window, and--as indifference to Zeppelins is not
confined to the sterner sex--a sprinkling of ladies, plump and matronly,
or of the masculine walking type, with two charmingly pretty girls and a
gay young war widow to leaven the mass.

The exception was a tall and portly gentleman with a slightly bald head,
glossy brown beard, gold-rimmed eye-glasses perilously balanced on a
prominent nose, and an important manner. He was breakfasting alone at a
table not far from Colwyn's, and Colwyn noticed that he kept glancing at
the alcove table where the young man sat. As Colwyn looked in his
direction their eyes met, and the portly gentleman nodded portentously
in the direction of the alcove table, as an indication that he also had
been watching the curious behaviour of the occupant. A moment afterwards
he got up and walked across to the pillar against which Colwyn's table
was placed.

"Will you permit me to take a