This, however, was only the beginning. The sensation must be prolonged.
The next day there were attenuating circumstances.

It might be only a temporary embarrassment. The assets were vastly
greater than the liabilities. There was talk in financial circles of an
adjustment. With time the house could go on. The next day it was made
a reproach to the house that such deceptive hopes were put upon the
public. Journalistic enterprise had discovered that the extent of the
liabilities had been concealed. This attempt to deceive the public,
these defenders of the public interest would expose. The next day
the wind blew from another direction. The alarmists were rebuked. The
creditors were disposed to be lenient. Doubtful securities were likely
to realize more than was expected. The assignees were sharply scored for
not taking the newspapers into their confidence.

And so for ten days the failure went on in the newspapers, backward and
forward, now hopeless, now relieved, now sunk in endless complications,
and fallen into the hands of the lawyers who could be trusted with the
most equitable distribution of the property involved, until the reading
public were glad to turn, with the same eager zest, to the case of the
actress who was found dead in a hotel in Jersey City. She was attended
only by her pet poodle, in whose collar was embedded a jewel of great
price. This jewel was traced to a New York establishment, whence it had
disappeared under circumstances that pointed to the criminality of a
scion of a well-known family--an exposure which would shake society to
its foundations.

Meantime affairs took their usual course. The downfall of Mavick is too
well known in the Street to need explanation here. For a time it was
hoped that sacrifices of great interests would leave a modest little
fortune, but under the pressure of liquidation these hopes melted away.
If anything could be saved it would be only comparatively valueless
securities and embarrassed bits of property that usually are only
a delusion and a source of infinite worry to a bankrupt. It seemed
incredible that such a vast fortune should so disappear; but there were
wise men who, so they declared, had always predicted this disaster. For
some years after Henderson's death the fortune had appeared to expand
marvelously. It was, however, expanded, and not solidified. It had been
risked in many gigantic speculations (such as the Argentine), and it had
been liable to co