Sax Rohmer

“ It seemed to me that life at Cray’s Folly was quite agreeable, and such was my mood that the shadowy Bat Wing menace found no place in it save as the chimera of a sick man’s imagination. One thing only troubled me: the identity of the woman who had been with Colonel Menendez on the previous night.
However, such unconscious sun worshippers are we all that in the glory of that summer morning I realized that life was good, and I resolutely put behind me the dark suspicions of the night. ”

“ Presently we left the road and cantered across the valley meadows, in which I had walked on the previous day, reëntering Cray’s Folly on the south, although we had left it on the north. We dismounted in the stable-yard, and I noted two other saddle horses in the stalls, a pair of very clean-looking hunters, as well as two perfectly matched ponies, which, Jim informed me, Madame de Stämer sometimes drove in a chaise.
Feeling vastly improved by the exercise, I walked around to the veranda, and through the drawing room to the hall. ”

“ I continued, “the hospitality of Colonel Menendez is true hospitality. To expect one’s guests to perform their parlour tricks around a breakfast table in the morning is, on the other hand, true barbarism.” ”