ghout Europe
was Mora. When he fell, the structure was stripped of all its elegance,
marred by a long irreparable crack. And how many existences were
involved in that sudden fall, how many fortunes shattered by the after
effects of the catastrophe! Not one so completely as that of the stout
man sitting motionless on the monkeys' bench in the reception-room
below.

To the Nabob that man's death meant his own death, his ruin, the end of
everything. He was so thoroughly conscious of it that when he was
informed, on entering the house, of the Duke's desperate condition, he
indulged in no whining or wry faces of any sort, simply the savage
ejaculation of human selfishness: "I am lost!" And the words came
constantly to his lips, he repeated them instinctively each time that
all the horror of his position came over him in sudden flashes,--as in
those dangerous mountain storms, when a sharp flash of lightning
illumines the abyss to the very bottom, with the jagged projections of
the walls and the clumps of bushes scattered here and there to supply
the rents and bruises of the fall.

The rapid keenness of vision that accompanies cataclysms spared him no
detail. He saw that he was almost certain to be unseated now that Mora
would not be at hand to plead his cause; and the consequences of defeat,
bankruptcy, poverty and something worse, for these incalculable
fortunes, when they crumble away, always keep a little of a man's honor
under the ruins. But what thorns, what brambles, what bruises, what
cruel wounds before reaching the end! In a week the Schwalbach notes to
be paid, that is to say eight hundred thousand francs, Moessard's claim
for damages--he demanded a hundred thousand francs or would apply to the
Chamber for authority to institute criminal process against him--another
more dangerous suit begun by the families of two little martyrs of
Bethlehem against the founders of the establishment; and, in addition to
all the rest, the complications of the _Caisse Territoriale_. A single
ray of hope, Paul de Gery's negotiations with the bey, but so vague, so
problematical, so far away!

"Ah! I am lost! I am lost!"

In the vast apartment no one noticed his trouble. That crowd of
senators, deputies, councillors of state, all the leading men in the
government, went and came around him without seeing him, held mysterious
conferences and rested their elbows in anxious importance on the two
white marble mantels that faced each othe