The Battle of Basinghall Street by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Marsom, like most of the cultivated men of his race, was a man of taste.

He was dining alone, a few nights later, in Park Lane, but the fact that he had no guest interfered in no manner with the strictly disciplined régime of the service. A small dining table, a bijou counterpart of the one which stood in the middle of the room and which held sixty, had been drawn into the sweeping bay window, from which little flushes of the April twilight were faintly visible. The subdued roar of the world changing from its work-a-day life to play-time was like music in his ears. He loved action. Silence of any sort was unendurable to him. The silence of death was the one terrible apprehension which he refused to face.