Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/291

Rh night before feeling quite well, and as cheerful as his disapproval of Sylvia Bailey's proceedings at the Casino allowed him to be. And while thoroughly disapproving, he had yet—such being human nature—been glad that Sylvia had won and not lost!

The Wachners had offered to drive him back to his pension, and he had accepted, for it was very late, and Madame Wachner, in spite of her Fritz's losses, had insisted on taking a carriage home.

And then, though he had begun by going to sleep, Chester had waked at the end of an hour to feel himself encompassed, environed, oppressed by the perception—it was far more than a sensation—that he was no longer alone.

He sat up in bed and struck a match, at once longing and fearing to see a form,—the semblance of a human being—rise out of the darkness.

But all he saw, when he had lighted the candle which stood on the table by his bed, was the barely furnished room which, even in this poor and wavering light, had so cheerful and commonplace an appearance.

Owing no doubt to his excellent physical condition, as well as to his good conscience, Chester was a fearless man. A week ago he would have laughed to scorn the notion that the dead ever revisit the earth, as so many of us believe they do, but the four nights he had spent at the Pension Malfait, had shaken his conviction that "dead men rise up never."

Most reluctantly he had come to the conclusion that the Pension Malfait was haunted.

And the feeling of unease did not vanish even after