I saw a row of villas perched on a headland above the sea.

In the garden of one of them two men were playing tennis, while I was crouching behind an adjacent bush.

One of these was a plump young man who wore a coloured scarf round his waist and babbled of golf handicaps ...

I saw him again in the villa dining-room, wearing a dinner-jacket, and lisping a little....

I sat opposite him at bridge, I beheld him collared by two of Macgillivray's men, when his comrade had rushed for the thirty-nine steps that led to the sea ...