not the line he had meant his questions to take. What did it matter to
him how the man treated women? Pshaw! Then suddenly a light--as of
satisfaction, or discovery--gleamed in his eyes. "Do you mean," he
muttered, lowering his voice, "by sorcery?"

"God knows."

"By evil arts?"

The young man shook his head. "I do not know," he answered, almost
pettishly. "How should I? But he has a power. A secret power! I do not
understand him or it!"

The Syndic looked at him darkly thoughtful. "You did not know that that
was said of him?" he asked.

"That he----"

"Has magical arts?"

Claude shook his head.

"Nor that he has a laboratory upstairs?" Blondel continued, fixing the
young man gravely with his eyes. "A laboratory in which he reads much in
unknown tongues? And speaks much when no one is present? And tries
experiments with strange substances?"

Claude shook his head. "No!" he said. "Never! I never heard it."

He never had; but in his eyes dawned none the less a look of horror. No
man in those days doubted the existence of the devilish arts at which
Blondel hinted--arts by the use of which one being could make himself
master of the will and person of another. No man doubted their
existence: and that they were rare, were difficult, were seldom brought
within a man's experience, made them only the more hateful without
making them seem to the men of that day the less probable. That they
were often exercised at the cost of the innocent and pure, who in this
way were added to the accursed brood--few doubted this too; but the full
horror of it could be known only to the man who loved, and who
reverenced where he loved. Fortunately, men who never doubted the
reality of witchcraft, seldom conceived of it as touching those about
them; and it was only slowly that Claude took in the meaning of the
Syndic's suggestion, or discerned how perfectly it accounted for a thing
otherwise unaccountable--the mysterious sway which the scholar held over
the young girl.

But he reached, he came to that point at last; and his silence and
agitation were more eloquent than words. The Syndic, who had not shot
his bolt wholly at a venture--for to accuse Basterga of the black art
had passed through his mind before--saw that he had hit the mark; and he
pushed his advantage. "Have you noted aught," he asked, "to bear out the
idea that he is given to such practices?"

Claude was silent in sheer horror: horror of the thing suggested to him,