The hotel restaurant's tables are but sparsely occupied. Two nights before, a Zeppelin had dropped a few 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 unlikely to happen again. Off and away the nervous ones went all the same, leaving 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 the nerve-proof handful.

Yet another hotel guest besides Sir Durwood has noticed the same oddities, in the mysterious hotel guest: and this is Grant Colwyn . . . half English, half American -- and the most famous detective on two continents.