it had, suddenly, without one flicker of warning. An insane
thing to happen to one, at such an hour, in such a place...

Involuntarily memory harked back to the night of his first dinner in
the chateau, when the shadows had danced so weirdly, and the strange
notion had come to him that they were like famished spectres, greedy of
the lights, yearning to spring and snatch and feed upon them, as wolves
might snatch at chops.

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