"Black Arts," I laughed.

"Who knows?" he rejoined quietly. "The man undoubtedly possessed
knowledge--dark knowledge--that was most unusual and dangerous, and I
can discover no means by which he came to it--no ordinary means, that
is. But I _have_ found many facts in the case which point to the
exercise of a most desperate and unscrupulous will; and the strange
disappearances in the neighbourhood, as well as the bones found buried
in the kitchen garden, though never actually traced to him, seem to me
full of dreadful suggestion."

I laughed again, a little uncomfortably perhaps, and said it reminded
one of the story of Giles de Rays, maréchal of France, who was said to
have killed and tortured to death in a few years no less than one
hundred and sixty women and children for the purposes of necromancy, and
who was executed for his crimes at Nantes. But Shorthouse would not
"rise," and only returned to his subject.

"His suicide seems to have been only just in time to escape arrest," he
said.

"A magician of no high order then," I observed sceptically, "if suicide
was his only way of evading the country police."

"The police of London and St. Petersburg rather," returned Shorthouse;
"for the headquarters of this pretty company was somewhere in Russia,
and his apparatus all bore the marks of the most skilful foreign make. A
Russian woman then employed in the household--governess, or
something--vanished, too, about the same time and was never caught. She