Gentlemen of Crime by Arthur Gask

THAT same afternoon, only five miles distant from Bodham Castle, a little man as short in stature as Ephraim Smith, but very different from him in every other particular, was reading a letter. He sat in a big arm-chair in a long, low room, which looked out through large windows over a hundred yards of close-cut lawn to the sands of the seashore, and the white waves of the sea itself.

The house, a rambling, old-fashioned building, was situated upon so low-lying a stretch of ground that the room in which the reader sat seemed to be scarcely above sea level; but in reality it was only the expanse of lawn, with its gentle downward slope, and the clear and uninterrupted view of the ocean that conveyed this impression.