“He makes them, man!  He makes them!” he burst out between gritting teeth.  “Don’t you understand? He makes them!”

Mr. Latham, astonished and a little startled, came to his feet; the phlegmatic German sat still, staring at the expert without comprehension.  Mr. Czenki’s thin fist was clenched under his employer’s nose, and the jeweler drew back a little, vaguely alarmed.

“I don’t understand what—­” he began.

“The diamonds!” Mr. Czenki interrupted, and the long pent-up excitement within him burst into a flame of impatience.  “The diamonds!  He makes them!  Don’t you see?  Diamonds!  He manufactures them!”

“Gott in Himmel!” exclaimed Mr. Schultze, and it was anything but an irreverent ejaculation.  He arose.  “Der miracle has come to pass!  Ve might haf known!  Ve might haf known!”

“Millions and millions of dollars’ worth of them, even billions, for all we know,” the expert rushed on in incoherent violence.  “A sum greater than all the combined wealth of the world in the hands of one man!  Think of it!” Mr. Latham only gazed at him blankly, and he turned instinctively to the one who understood—­Mr. Schultze.  “Think of the mind that achieved it, man!”

He collapsed into a chair and sat looking at the floor, his fingers writhing within one another, muttering to himself.  Mr. Latham was a cold, sane, unimaginative man of business.  As yet the full import of it all hadn’t reached him.  He stared dumbly, first at Mr. Czenki, then at Mr. Schultze.  There was not even incredulity in the look, only faint amazement that two such well-balanced men should have gone mad at once.  At last the German importer turned upon him flatly.

“Why don’d you ged egzited aboud id, Laadham?” he demanded.  “He iss all righd, nod crazy,” he added with whimsical assurance.  “He iss delling you dat dose diamonds are made—­made like doughnuds, mitoud der hole; manufactured, pud togedher.  Don’d you ged id?”

He ran off into guttural German expletives; and slowly, slowly the idea began to dawn upon Mr. Latham.  The diamonds Mr. Wynne had shown were not real, then; they were artificial!  It was some sort of a swindle!  Of course!  But the experts had agreed that they were diamonds—­real diamonds!  Perhaps they had been deceived, or—­by George!  Did these two men mean to say that they were real diamonds, but that they were manufactured? Mr. Latham’s tidy little imagination balked at that.  Absurd!  Whoever heard of a diamond as big as the Koh-i-noor, or the Regent, or the Orloff being made?  They were crazy—­the pair of them!

“Do I understand,” he demanded in a tone of deliberate annoyance, “that you, Czenki, and you, Schultze, expect me to believe that those diamonds we saw were not natural, but were real diamonds turned out by machinery in a—­in a diamond factory?  Is that what you are driving at?