CHAPTER II.—THE OLD MILL.IN the meanwhile Hardacre was settling down somewhat uneasily in a little inn just outside Burnham, right on the muddy banks of the River Crouch. Of all places in which to hide away he had chosen Burnham because, as a boy, he had once spent a holiday there, and it had always remained in his memory as one of the quietest places he had been in. Surrounded in every direction by boggy Essex flats, except in summer and then only for a few weeks, the district was as lonely and unfrequented as anyone could wish, the only permanent inhabitants being a few fishermen and some farmers with very small holdings. He had remembered, too, a lonely little inn which stood all by itself about half a mile out of the town on its seaward side and, when he had been driven there that co