ng."

"I exaggerate!" he defended himself. "My way of putting things! My
dear fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and
financial jargon off my statements. And you are startled! I am giving
you the naked truth. It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the
charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth. What
comes with a shock is admitted with difficulty. But what will you say
to the end of his career?"

It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden. It began with the
Orb Deposit Bank. Under the name of that institution de Barral with the
frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian
prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the
government. It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs--a miserable
remnant of his ancestors' treasures--that sort of thing. And it was all
authentic enough. There was a real prince; and the claim too was
sufficiently real--only unfortunately it was not a valid claim. So the
prince lost his case on the last appeal and the beginning of de Barral's
end became manifest to the public in the shape of a half-sheet of note
paper watered by the four corners on the closed door of The Orb offices
notifying that payment was stopped at that establishment.

Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week. I won't say in
American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de
Barral concerns. There never had been any bottom to it. It was like
the cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its
deposits. That they were gone was clear; and the bankruptcy proceedings
which followed were like a sinister farce, bursts of laughter in a
setting of mute anguish--that of the depositors; hundreds of thousands
of them. The laughter was irresistible; the accompaniment of the
bankrupt's public examination.

I don't know if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the
possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from
both--and the three alternatives are possible--but it was discovered
that this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of
the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had
been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and
even lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had
gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast
of Pa