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. Telling his courteous landlord that he would not be in to luncheon, Chester left the house, and as it was still far too early to seek out Sylvia, he struck out, with the aid of the little pocket-map of the environs of Paris with which he had been careful to provide himself, towards the open country. And as he swung quickly along, feeling once more tired and depressed, the Englishman wondered more and more why Sylvia Bailey cared to stay in such a place as Lacville. It struck him as neither town nor country--more like an unfinished suburb than anything else, with almost every piece of spare land up for sale. He walked on and on till at last he came to the edge of a great stretch of what looked like primeval woodland. This surely must be part of the famous Forest of Montmorency, which his guide-book mentioned as being the great attraction of Lacville? He wondered cynically whether Sylvia had ever been so far, and then he plunged into the wood, along one of the ordered alleys which to his English eyes looked so little forest-like, and yet which made walking there very pleasant.