Treading softly, and yet hearing her footsteps echoing with unpleasant loudness through the empty house, Sylvia Bailey walked past the open door of the little kitchen, and so to the end of the passage.

Then something extraordinary happened.

While in the act of opening the door of Madame Wachner’s bed-room, the young Englishwoman stopped and caught her breath.  Again she had suddenly experienced that unpleasant, eerie sensation—­the sensation that she was not alone.  But this time the feeling was far more vivid than it had been in the dining-room.

So strong, so definite was Sylvia’s perception of another presence, and this time of a human presence, in the still house, that she turned sharply round—­

But all she saw was the empty passage, cut by a shaft of light thrown from the open door of the kitchen, stretching its short length down to the entrance hall.

Making a determined effort over what she could but suppose to be 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!