It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel, like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild apostrophisings of the _thing_, held up in worshipping hands before two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the mystery--only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close. One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always, among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend. It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man, her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable disappearance of the two. He believed the story--and he did not believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil, to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of _being_ the instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose. And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before the expectant house.