I confess it was a sufficiently suspicious conjunction.  The three representatives of the diamond interest gazed at each other with inquiring side-glances.  Then their eyes fell suddenly:  they avoided one another.  Had each independently substituted a weak and inferior natural stone for Professor Schleiermacher’s manufactured pebbles?  It almost seemed so.  For a moment, I admit, I was half inclined to suppose it.  But next second I changed my mind.  Could a man of Sir Charles Vandrift’s integrity and high principle stoop for lucre’s sake to so mean an expedient?—­not to mention the fact that, even if he did, and if Mosenheimer did likewise, the stones submitted to the scientific men would have amply sufficed to establish the reality and success of the experiments!

Still, I must say, Charles looked guiltily across at Mosenheimer, and Mosenheimer at Phipson, while three more uncomfortable or unhappy-faced men could hardly have been found at that precise minute in the City of Westminster.

Then Sir Adolphus spoke—­or, rather, he orated.  He said, in his loud and grating voice, we had that evening, and on a previous evening, been present at the conception and birth of an Epoch in the History of Science.  Professor Schleiermacher was one of those men of whom his native Saxony might well be proud; while as a Briton he must say he regretted somewhat that this discovery, like so many others, should have been “Made in Germany.”  However, Professor Schleiermacher was a specimen of that noble type of scientific men to whom gold was merely the rare metal Au, and diamonds merely the element C in the scarcest of its manifold allotropic embodiments.  The Professor did not seek to make money out of his discovery.  He rose above the sordid greed of capitalists.  Content with the glory of having traced the element C to its crystalline origin, he asked no more than the approval of science.  However, out of deference to the wishes of those financial gentlemen who were oddly concerned in maintaining the present price of C in its crystalline form—­in other words, the diamond interest—­they had arranged that the secret should be strictly guarded and kept for the present; not one of the few persons admitted to the experiments would publicly divulge the truth about them.  This secrecy would be maintained till he himself, and a small committee of the Royal Society, should have time to investigate and verify for themselves the Professor’s beautiful and ingenious processes—­an investigation and verification which the learned Professor himself both desired and suggested.  (Schleiermacher nodded approval.) When that was done, if the process stood the test, further concealment would be absolutely futile.  The price of diamonds must fall at once below that of paste, and any protest on the part of the financial world would, of course, be useless.  The laws of Nature were superior to millionaires.  Meanwhile, in deference to the opinion of Sir Charles