A mad fancy...

When he turned hack to relight the candle, it was gone.

At least he must have been mistaken as to the exact spot where he had placed it.  Perplexed, he pawed over all that end of the table.  But no candlestick was there.

He straightened up sharply, and stood quite still, listening.  No sound...

His vision spent itself fruitlessly against the blackness, which the closed window draperies rendered absolute but for those dull, sardonic eyes of dying embers.

In spite of himself he knew a moment when flesh crawled and the hair seemed to stir upon the scalp; for Duchemin knew he was not alone; there was something else in the room with him, something nameless, stealthy, silent, sinister; having knowledge of him, where he stood and what he was, while he knew nothing of it, only that it was there, keeping surveillance over him, itself unseen in its cloak of darkness.

Then with a resolute effort of will he mastered his imagination, reminding himself that spirits gifted in the matter of moving material objects such as candlesticks, frequent only the booths of seance mediums.

Without a sound he stepped back one pace, then two to one side, away from the table.  They were long strides; when he paused he was well away from the spot where he had stood when the light was extinguished and where, consequently, a hostile move might be expected to develop.  Otherwise his plight was little bettered; he did not quite know where he was in relation to the doors and the pieces which furnished the room.  That old-time habit of memorising the arrangement of furniture in a room immediately on entering it had failed through disuse in course of years.  He was acquainted with the plot of this drawing-room in a general way but by no means with such accuracy as was needed to serve him now.

So he waited, straining to cheat that opaque pall of night of one little hint as to his whereabouts who had removed the light.  Resurrecting another old trick, he measured time by pulse-beats, and stood unstirring and all but breathless for three full minutes.  But perceptions stimulated to extra sensibility by apprehension of danger detected nothing.  And his hearing was so keen, he told himself, no breath could have been drawn in that time without his having knowledge of it.  Still, he knew he was not alone.  Somewhere in that encompassing murk an alien and inimical intelligence skulked.

Baffled by powers of patience and immobility that mocked his own, he moved again, edging toward the entrance-hall, a progress so gradual he could have sworn it must be imperceptible.  Yet he had a feeling, a suspicion, perhaps merely a fear, that he did not stir a finger without the other’s knowledge.

A hand extended about a foot encountered the back of an upholstered chair, which he identified by touch.  Assuming the chair to be occupying its usual position, he need only continue in a line parallel with the line of its back to find the entrance-hall in about six paces.