as well," he cried. He could have had half the town at his
rooms to fawn upon him if he had cared for that sort of thing. "Why,
now I think of it, it took me most of my time to keep people, just of
your sort, off me," he ended with a good humoured--quite unobtrusive,
contempt, as though the fact had dawned upon him for the first time.

This was the moment, the only moment, when he had perhaps all the
audience in Court with him, in a hush of dreary silence. And then the
dreary proceedings were resumed. For all the outside excitement it was
the most dreary of all celebrated trials. The bankruptcy proceedings
had exhausted all the laughter there was in it. Only the fact of
wide-spread ruin remained; and the resentment of a mass of people for
having been fooled by means too simple to save their self-respect from a
deep wound which the cleverness of a consummate scoundrel would not have
inflicted. A shamefaced amazement attended these proceedings in which
de Barral was not being exposed alone. For himself his only cry was:
Time! Time! Time would have set everything right. In time some of
these speculations of his were certain to have succeeded. He repeated
this defence, this excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome
iteration. Everything he had done or left undone had been to gain time.
He had hypnotised himself with the word. Sometimes, I am told, his
appearance was ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing
down the vista of future ages. Time--and of course, more money. "Ah!
If only you had left me alone for a couple of years more," he cried once
in accents of passionate belief. "The money was coming in all right."
The deposits you understand--the savings of Thrift. Oh yes they had
been coming in to the very last moment. And he regretted them. He had
arrived to regard them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion. And
yet it was a perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel
who was beginning a question with the words "You have had all these
immense sums..." with the indignant retort "_What_ have I had out of
them?"

"It was perfectly true. He had had nothing out of them--nothing of the
prestigious or the desirable things of the earth, craved for by
predatory natures. He had gratified no tastes, had known no luxury; he
had built no gorgeous palaces, had formed no splendid galleries out of
these `immense sums.' He had not even a home. He had gone into these
room