Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/257

Rh presence. It was a very extraordinary and a most unpleasant feeling, one which Chester had never experienced before, and it made him afraid—afraid he knew not of what.

Being the manner of man he was, he began to think that he must be ill—that there must be something the matter with his nerves. Had he been at home, in Market Dalling, he would have gone to a doctor without loss of time.

Long afterwards, when people used to speak before him of haunted houses, Bill Chester would remember the Pension Malfait and the extraordinary sensations he had experienced there—sensations the more extraordinary that there was nothing to account for them.

But Chester never told anyone of his experiences, and indeed there was nothing to tell. He never saw anything, he never even heard anything, but now and again, especially when he was lying awake at night and in the early morning, the lawyer felt as if some other entity was struggling to communicate with him and could not do so. …

The whole time he was there—and he stayed on at Lacville, as we shall see, rather longer than he at first intended—Chester never felt, when in his room at the Pension Malfait really alone, and sometimes the impression became almost intolerably vivid.