Sylvia gave a little cry of protest.

“How unkind you are, Count Paul!” She still tried to speak lightly, but the tears were now rolling down her cheeks—­and then in a moment she found herself in Paul de Virieu’s arms.  She felt his heart beating against her breast.

“Oh, my darling!” he whispered brokenly, in French, “my darling, how I love you!”

“But if you love me,” she said piteously, “what does anything else matter?”

Her hand had sought his hand.  He grasped it for a moment and then let it go.

“It is because I love you—­because I love you more than I love myself that I give you up,” he said, but, being human, he did not give her up there and then.  Instead, he drew her closer to him, and his lips sought and found her sweet, tremulous mouth.

* * * * *

And Chester?  Chester that morning for the first time in his well-balanced life felt not only ill but horribly depressed.  He had come back to the Pension Malfait the 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 he had taken his bath in the queer bath-room, of which the Malfaits were so proud, or later, when he had eaten the excellent breakfast provided for him.  On the contrary, the thought of going up to his bed-room, even in broad daylight, filled him with a kind of shrinking fear.

He told himself angrily that this kind of thing could not go on.  The sleepless nights made him ill—­he who never was ill; also he was losing precious days of his short holiday, while doing no good to himself and no good to Sylvia.