Mr.
Brimsdown had never accepted that theory, but it was strange to have it so conclusively proved, as it were, by the inference of an omission.

That brought the lawyer back to the position that some foreboding or warning of his murder had caused Robert Turold to summon him to Cornwall by letter.
The next step of his investigations led Mr.Brimsdown to the dead man's study, where that frantic appeal had been penned.
He engaged a vehicle at the hotel and drove over to Flint House in the afternoon.

The impression of that visit remained.

Flint House, rising from the basalt summit of the headland like a granite vault, its windows coldly glistening down on the frothy green gloom of the Atlantic far beneath, the country trap and lean black horse at the flapping gate, the undertaker's man (dissolute parasite of austere Death) slinking out of the house, and Thalassa waiting at the open door for him to approach--all these things were engraved on Mr.Brimsdown's mind, never to be forgotten.

Who was it that had staged such a crime in such a proscenium, in that vast amphitheatre of black rocks which stretched dizzily down beneath those gleaming windows?
Then came other impressions: the dead man upstairs, the disordered dusty study, the stopped clock, the litter of papers.