A harsh, wild laugh rang through the room, its faint echoes startling the little man in the outer office.
“Collapsed!” cried Julian. “Collapsed, by Heaven!”
He put out one hand gropingly, caught at a chair near him and dropped heavily into it, letting his face fall forward upon his folded arms as they rested upon its back.
Only half an hour had passed since he had gone to his rooms in the Temple after a picnic on the river, to find waiting for him there a telegram from Ramsay. And into that half-hour had been compressed such a desperate stand against despair as is little less terrible than despair itself. The telegram had told him that on the opening of the Stock Exchange that morning it had been spread abroad on unimpeachable authority that the Welcome Diamond Mine was under water. This evening, the inevitable sequel of such a fact, as he knew too well, shares in the Welcome Diamond Mining Company were so much waste-paper.
Ramsay stood for a moment looking at him, with a rather curious expression on his inexpressive face.
“It’s a turn of the game,” he said drily. “If you stand to win, you must stand to lose, too. You hadn’t thought of that, I suppose?”
With a sudden tumultuous movement, as though his agony of mind was no longer to be endured in stillness, Julian sprang from his chair and began to walk up and down the room with hasty, uneven strides.
“Thought of it!” he cried. “What was there to make one think of it? It was a certainty yesterday, man; a certainty!”
A spasm passed across his face, and seemed to cut off his words, and Ramsay observed sententiously:
“It’s a mistake to reckon anything as a certainty till you hold it in your hand.”