But Shorthouse, I soon discovered, had seen to all that; our enterprise would be tolerated, not welcomed, for the master kept this sort of thing down with a firm hand.  And then, how little I could get this man, Shorthouse, to tell me.  There was much I wanted to ask and hear, but he surrounded himself with impossible barriers.  It was ludicrous; he was surely asking a good deal of me, and yet he would give so little in return, and his reason—­that it was for my good—­may have been perfectly true, but did not bring me any comfort in its train.  He gave me sops now and then, however, to keep up my curiosity, till I soon was aware that there were growing up side by side within me a genuine interest and an equally genuine fear; and something of both these is probably necessary to all real excitement.

The barn in question was some distance from the house, on the side of the stables, and I had passed it on several of my journeyings to and fro wondering at its forlorn and untarred appearance under a regime where everything was so spick and span; but it had never once occurred to me as possible that I should come to spend a night under its roof with a comparative stranger, and undergo there an experience belonging to an order of things I had always rather ridiculed and despised.

At the moment I can only partially recall the process by which Shorthouse persuaded me to lend him my company.  Like myself, he was a guest in this autumn house-party, and where there were so many to chatter and to chaff, I think his taciturnity of manner had appealed to me by contrast, and that I wished to repay something of what I owed.  There was, no doubt, flattery in it as well, for he was more than twice my age, a man of amazingly wide experience, an explorer of all the world’s corners where danger lurked, and—­most subtle flattery of all—­by far the best shot in the whole party, our host included.

At first, however, I held out a bit.

“But surely this story you tell,” I said, “has the parentage common to all such tales—­a superstitious heart and an imaginative brain—­and has grown now by frequent repetition into an authentic ghost story?  Besides, this head gardener of half a century ago,” I added, seeing that he still went on cleaning his gun in silence, “who was he, and what positive information have you about him beyond the fact that he was found hanging from the rafters, dead?”

“He was no mere head gardener, this man who passed as such,” he replied without looking up, “but a fellow of splendid education who used this curious disguise for his own purposes.  Part of this very barn, of which he always kept the key, was found to have been fitted up as a complete laboratory, with athanor, alembic, cucurbite, and other appliances, some of which the master destroyed at once—­perhaps for the best—­and which I have only been able to guess at—­”

“Black Arts,” I laughed.