Charles was fairly staggered.  It was the obvious original of the false Von Lebenstein.

The photograph went round the box once more.  The jury smiled incredulously.  Charles had given himself away.  His overweening confidence and certainty had ruined him.

Then Colonel Clay, leaning forward, and looking quite engaging, began a new line of cross-examination.  “We have seen, Sir Charles,” he said, “that we cannot implicitly trust your identifications.  Now let us see how far we can trust your other evidence.  First, then, about those diamonds.  You tried to buy them, did you not, from a person who represented himself as the Reverend Richard Brabazon, because you believed he thought they were paste; and if you could, you would have given him 10 pounds or so for them. Do you think that was honest?”

“I object to this line of cross-examination,” our leading counsel interposed.  “It does not bear on the prosecutor’s evidence.  It is purely recriminatory.”

Colonel Clay was all bland deference.  “I wish, my lord,” he said, turning round, “to show that the prosecutor is a person unworthy of credence in any way.  I desire to proceed upon the well-known legal maxim of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.  I believe I am permitted to shake the witness’s credit?”

“The prisoner is entirely within his rights,” Rhadamanth answered, looking severely at Charles.  “And I was wrong in suggesting that he needed the advice or assistance of counsel.”

Charles wriggled visibly.  Colonel Clay perked up.  Bit by bit, with dexterous questions, Charles was made to acknowledge that he wanted to buy diamonds at the price of paste, knowing them to be real; and, a millionaire himself, would gladly have diddled a poor curate out of a couple of thousand.

“I was entitled to take advantage of my special knowledge,” Charles murmured feebly.

“Oh, certainly,” the prisoner answered.  “But, while professing friendship and affection for a clergyman and his wife, in straitened circumstances, you were prepared, it seems, to take three thousand pounds’ worth of goods off their hands for ten pounds, if you could have got them at that price.  Is not that so?”

Charles was compelled to admit it.

The prisoner went onto the David Granton incident.  “When you offered to amalgamate with Lord Craig-Ellachie,” he asked, “had you or had you not heard that a gold-bearing reef ran straight from your concession into Lord Craig-Ellachie’s, and that his portion of the reef was by far the larger and more important?”

Charles wriggled again, and our counsel interposed; but Rhadamanth was adamant.  Charles had to allow it.

And so, too, with the incident of the Slump in Golcondas.  Unwillingly, shamefacedly, by torturing steps, Charles was compelled to confess that he had sold out Golcondas—­he, the Chairman of the company, after repeated declarations to shareholders and others that he would do no such thing—­because he thought Professor Schleiermacher had made diamonds worthless.  He had endeavoured to save himself by ruining his company.  Charles tried to brazen it out with remarks to the effect that business was business.  “And fraud is fraud,” Rhadamanth added, in his pungent way.