Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/221

Rh She glanced round her with distaste. Everything was not only cheap, but common and tawdry. Still, the dining-room, like all the other rooms in the châlet, was singularly clean, and almost oppressively neat.

There was the round table at which she and Anna Wolsky had been so kindly entertained, the ugly buffet or sideboard, and in place of the dull parquet floor she remembered on her first visit lay an ugly piece of linoleum, of which the pattern printed on the surface simulated a red and blue marble pavement.

Once more the change puzzled her, perhaps unreasonably.

At last Sylvia got up from the hard cane chair on which she had been sitting.

There had come over her, in the half-darkness, a very peculiar sensation—an odd feeling that there was something alive in the room. She looked down, half expecting to see some small animal crouching under the table, or hiding by the walnut-wood buffet behind her.

But, no; nothing but the round table, and the six chairs stiffly placed against the wall, met her eyes. And yet, still that feeling that there was in the room some sentient creature besides herself persisted.

She opened the door giving into the hall, and walked through the short passage which divided the house into two portions, into the tiny "salon."

Here also the closed shutters gave the room a curious, eerie look of desolate greyness. But Sylvia's eyes, already accustomed to the half-darkness next door, saw everything perfectly.

The little sitting-room looked mean and shabby. There