But Chester was shrewd enough to know that Sylvia had felt ashamed to be caught by him gambling—gambling, too, in such very mixed company. Well, she would soon be leaving Lacville! What a pity those friends of hers had given up their Swiss holiday! It would have been so jolly if they could have gone on there together.
He got tired of lying in bed. What a long night, as well as a very short night, it had been! He rose and made his way down to the primitive bath-room. It would be delightful to have any sort of bath, and the huge zinc basin had its points—
As Chester went quickly back to his room, instead of feeling refreshed after his bath, he again experienced the disagreeable sensation that he was not alone. This time he felt as if he were being accompanied by an invisible 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.
CHAPTER XXI
But the longest night, the most haunted night, and Chester's night had indeed been haunted, comes to an end at last. After he had had another bath and a good breakfast he felt a very different man to what he had done three or four hours ago, lying awake in the sinister, companioned atmosphere of his bed-room at the Pension Malfait.