e her
nerves, she walked through into the Wachners' bed-room.

It was very bare and singularly poorly furnished, at least to English
eyes, but it was pleasantly cool after the drawing-room.

She walked across to the window, and, drawing aside the muslin curtains,
looked out.

Beyond the patch of shade thrown by the house the sun beat down on
a ragged, unkempt lawn, but across the lawn she noticed, much more
particularly than she had done on the two former occasions when she had
been in the house, that there lay a thick grove of chestnut trees just
beyond the grounds of the Chalet des Muguets.

A hedge separated the lawn from the wood, but like everything else in the
little property it had been neglected, and there were large gaps in it.

She turned away from the window--

Yes, there, at last, was what she had come into this room to seek!
Close to the broad, low bed was a writing-table, or, rather, a deal
table, covered with a turkey red cloth, on which lay a large sheet of
ink-stained, white blotting-paper.

Flanking the blotting-paper was a pile of Monsieur Wachner's little red
books--the books in which he so carefully noted the turns of the game at
the Casino, and which served him as the basis of his elaborate gambling
"systems."

Sylvia went up to the writing-table, and, bending over it, began looking
for some notepaper. But there was nothing of the sort to be seen;
neither paper nor envelopes lay on the table.

This was the more absurd, as there were several pens, and an inkpot
filled to the brim.

She told herself that the only thing to do was to tear a blank leaf out
of one of L'Ami Fritz's note-books, and on it write her message of
invitation. If she left the little sheet of paper propped up on the
dining-table, the Wachners would be sure to see it.

She took up the newest-looking of the red note-books, and as she opened
it she suddenly felt, and for the third time, that there was a living
presence close to her--and this time that it was that of Anna Wolsky!

It was an extraordinary sensation--vivid, uncanny, terrifying--the more
so that Sylvia Bailey not only believed herself to be alone in the house,
but supposed Anna to be far from Lacville....

Fortunately, this unnerving and terrifying impression of an unseen and
yet real presence did not endure; and, as she focussed her eyes on the
open book she held in her hand, it became fainter and fainter, while she
realised, with a keen sense of relief,