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 hypnotized
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 rooms in
an hotel and had stuck there for years, giving no doubt perfect
satisfaction to the management. They had twice raised his rent to show I
suppose their high sense of his distinguished patronage. He had bought