"One of the most eloquent men I have ever come across. I remember, at the time----" he smiled apologetically--"I thought what a preacher was lost to the Church! And with it an enthusiasm, a grip of his subject and a faith in the prospects, which carried his listeners bodily away. To give you an example of this, Warleigh's poor old butler invested his savings--the hardly won nest-egg of forty years' service--then and there in the affair. He handed every penny of it over to Schliff before he left." "What a shame!" Mrs. Cadell's sympathy was plainly aroused--"I suppose he will never get it back?" "I fear not. And he's one of many." The Bishop frowned thoughtfully. "Looking through a list of shareholders only this morning I was surprised to find many names I knew personally of quite small people with narrow incomes. Good people too, I mean. Service men and petty squires living in the depths of the country." "Exactly." McTaggart's face was grim--"the usual victims, I'm afraid. But it seems to have dragged on rather longer than these forlorn hopes generally do. What reason do they give for the fall in shares? and the absence of a dividend? What do the reports say?" "Oh--they're full of excuses." The Bishop's thin, delicate hand went out in a gesture of impatience. "For instance--new machinery--some hitch in the process--a technical difference of opinion between the experts they employ. With always the same golden future dangled before our weary eyes, in Schliff's magnetic and pompous speeches, bolstered up by his tame directors. And the _money_ sunk in it--thousands squandered! With nothing practical to show--to warrant the huge expenditure." "I suppose by now," McTaggart hazarded, "Schliff's a pretty prosperous man?" "I couldn't say. To give him his due I should hesitate to class the man in any way as unscrupulous. He has a firm belief in himself and in anything that he undertakes. It's temperamental and most misleading; but I think, according to his light, he's honest. I really think so! That's the perplexing part to me. But he's hypnotized by his own verbosity----" the Bishop paused, pleased with the phrase--"he sees himself a second Napoleon--alas! without his genius for management." McTaggart allowed himself the luxury of a long-repressed smile. "The type is perhaps not uncommon. If you like I'll make a few inquiries--quite quietly, of course--and find out what sort of a record he bears in the city. I conclude this isn't his first venture? Herman Schliff ... and the Company?" He made a note upon his cuff. "Oh, it's really no trouble--I'm interested in the affair." "I wish I were not!" The victim smiled. "But I went on buying after the fall." Mrs. Cadell's restless eyes met McTaggart's. They both smiled. Then she signalled to the butler to fill up the Bishop's glass.