“That be Monk’s Cliff,” vouchsafed the driver conversationally.  “Bit of a lonesome place for folks to choose to live at, ain’t it?”

“Who lives there?” asked Sara with interest.

“Gentleman of the name of Trent—­queer kind of bloke he must be, too, if all’s true they say of ’im.  He’s lived there a matter of ten years or more—­lives by ’imself with just a man and his wife to do for ’im.  Far End, they calls the ’ouse.”

“Far End,” repeated Sara.  The name conveyed an odd sense of remoteness and inaccessibility.  It seemed peculiarly appropriate to a house built thus on the very edge of the mainland.

Her eyes rested musingly on the bleak promontory.  It would be a fit abode, she thought, for some recluse, determined to eschew the society of his fellow-men; here he could dwell, solitary and apart, surrounded on three sides by the grey, dividing sea, and protected on the fourth by the steep untempting climb that lay betwixt the town and the lonely house on the cliff.

“’Ere you are, miss.  This is Dr. Selwyn’s.”

The voice of her Jehu roused her from her reflections to find that the cab had stopped in front of a white-painted wooden gate bearing the legend, “Sunnyside,” painted in black letters across its topmost bar.

“I’ll take the keb round to the stable-yard, miss; it’ll be more convenient-like for the luggage,” added the man, with a mildly disapproving glance towards the narrow tiled path leading from the gate to the house-door.

Sara nodded, and, having paid him his fare, made her way through the white gateway and along the path.

There seemed a curious absence of life about the place.  No sound of voices broke the silence, and, although the front door stood invitingly open, there was no sign of any one hovering in the background ready to receive her.

Vaguely chilled—­since, of course, they must be expecting her—­she rang the bell.  It clanged noisily through the house but failed to produce any more important result than the dislodging of some dust from a ledge above which the bell-wire ran.  Sara watched it fall and lie on the floor in a little patch of fine, greyish powder.

The hall, of which the open door gave view, though of considerable dimensions, was poorly furnished.  The wide expanse of colour-washed wall was broken only by a hat-stand, on which hung a large assortment of masculine hats and coats, all of them looking considerably the worse for wear, and by two straight-backed chairs placed with praiseworthy exactitude at equal distances apart from the aforesaid rather overburdened piece of furniture.  The floor was covered with linoleum of which the black and white chess-board pattern had long since retrogressed with usage into an uninspiring blur.  A couple of threadbare rugs completed a somewhat depressing “interior.”

Sara rang the bell a second time, on this occasion with an irritable force that produced clangour enough, one would have thought, to awaken the dead.  It served, at all events, to arouse the living, for presently heavy footsteps could be heard descending the stairs, and, finally, a middle-aged maidservant, whose cap had obviously been assumed in haste, appeared, confronting Sara with an air of suspicion that seemed rather to suggest that she might have come after the spoons.