“Messieurs,” Goslin commenced, and—­speaking in French—­began apologising at being compelled to call them together so soon after their last meeting.  “The matter, however, is of such urgency,” he went on, “that this conference is absolutely necessary.  I am here in Sir Henry’s place, with a statement from him—­an alarming statement.  Our enemies have unfortunately triumphed.”

“What do you mean?” cried the Italian, starting to his feet.

“Simply this.  Poor Sir Henry has been the victim of treachery.—­Those papers which you, my dear Volkonski, brought to me in secret at Glencardine a month ago have been stolen!”

“Stolen!” gasped the shabby old man, his grey eyes starting from his head; “stolen! Dieu! Think what that means to us—­to me—­to my house!  They will be sold to the Ministry of Finance in Petersburg, and I shall be ruined—­ruined!”

“Not only you will be ruined!” remarked the man from Hamburg, “but our control of the market will be at an end.”

“And together we lose over three million roubles,” said Goslin in as quiet a voice as he could assume.

The six men—­those men who dealt in millions, men whose names, every one of them, were as household words on the various Bourses of Europe and in banking circles, men who lent money to reigning Sovereigns and to States, whose interests were world-wide and whose influences were greater than those of Kings and Ministers—­looked at each other in blank despair.

“We have to face this fact, as Sir Henry points out to you, that at Petersburg the Department of Finance has no love for us.  We put on the screw a little too heavily when we sold them secretly those three Argentine cruisers.  We made a mistake in not being content with smaller profit.”

“Yes, if it had been a genuinely honest deal on their side,” remarked the Italian.  “But it was not.  In Russia the crowd made quite as great a profit as we did.”

“And all three ships were sent to the bottom of the sea four months afterwards,” added Frohnmeyer with a grim laugh.

“That isn’t the question,” Goslin said.  “What we have now to face is the peril of exposure.  No one can, of course, allege that we have ever resorted to any sharper practices than those of other financial groups; but the fact of our alliance and our impregnable strength will, when it is known, arouse the fiercest antagonism in certain circles.”

“No one suspects the secret of our alliance,” the Italian ejaculated.  “It must be kept—­kept at all hazards.”

Each man seated there knew that exposure of the tactics by which they were ruling the Bourse would mean the sudden end of their great prosperity.

“But this is not the first occasion that documents have been stolen from Sir Henry at Glencardine,” remarked the Baron Conrad de Hetzendorf.  “I remember the last time I went there to see him he explained how he had discovered his daughter with the safe open, and some of the papers actually in her hands.”