"But he is a learned man, I believe. He passes for such, does he not?" "Yes." "Yet you do not like him. Why?" Claude's face burned. "He puts his learning to no good use," he blurted out. "He uses it to--to torture women. If I could tell you all--all, Messer Blondel," the young man continued, in growing excitement, "you would understand me better! He gains power over people, a strange power, and abuses it." "Power? What do you mean? What kind of power?" "God knows." The Syndic stared a moment, his face expressive of contempt. This was 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?"