On the south you saw
the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only
the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a
strip--not considerable--of rough grass, dotted with old anchors,
capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach. Whatever may
have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and the sea, not
more than sixty yards now separated them.

The rest of the population of the inn was, of course, a golfing one, and
included few elements that call for a special description. The most
conspicuous figure was, perhaps, that of an _ancien militaire_, secretary
of a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible strength, and of
views of a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were apt to find utterance
after his attendance upon the ministrations of the Vicar, an estimable
man with inclinations towards a picturesque ritual, which he gallantly
kept down as far as he could out of deference to East Anglian tradition.

Professor Parkins, one of whose principal characteristics was pluck,
spent the greater part of the day following his arrival at Burnstow in
what he had called improving his game, in company with this Colonel
Wilson: and during the afternoon--whether the process of improvement were
to blame or not, I am not sure--the Colonel's demeanour assumed a
colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking
home with him from the links. He determined, after a short and furtive
look at that bristling moustache and those incarnadined features, that it
would be wiser to allow the influences of tea and tobacco to do what they
could with the Colonel before the dinner-hour should render a meeting
inevitable.

'I might walk home tonight along the beach,' he reflected--'yes, and take
a look--there will be light enough for that--at the ruins of which Disney
was talking. I don't exactly know where they are, by the way; but I
expect I can hardly help stumbling on them.'

This he accomplished, I may say, in the most literal sense, for in
picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught,
partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went.
When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a patch
of somewhat broken ground covered with small depressions and mounds.
These latter, when he came to examine them, proved to be simply masses of
flints embedded in mortar and grown over with turf. He must