session.

"My lord," he said faintly, "I do not wonder at your excitement,
aggressive as it renders you; but I cannot admit that false which I know
to be a for--"

"Silence! Say that word once more, and I shall forget myself and hurl
you out into the street like the dog of a Jew you are!"

"Have patience an instant, my lord. Will it profit your friend and
brother-in-arms if it be afterward said that when this charge was
brought against him, you, my Lord Rockingham, had so little faith in his
power to refute it that you bore down with all your mighty strength in a
personal assault upon one so weakly as myself, and sought to put an end
to the evidence against him by bodily threats against my safety, and
by--what will look legally, my lord, like--an attempt to coerce me into
silence and to obtain the paper from my hands by violence?"

Faint and hoarse the words were, but they were spoken with quiet
confidence, with admirable acumen; they were the very words to lash
the passions of his listener into unendurable fire, yet to chain them
powerless down; the Guardsman stood above him, his features flushed and
dark with rage, his eyes literally blazing with fury, his lips working
under his tawny, leonine beard. At every syllable he could have thrown
himself afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much
carrion; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and meshed
in the coils of subtlety--the desperate disadvantage at which Right
is so often placed, when met by the cunning science and sophistry of
Wrong--held the Seraph in their net now. He saw his own rashness, he saw
how his actions could be construed till they cast a slur even on the man
he defended; he saw how legally he was in error, how legally the
gallant vengeance of an indignant friendship might be construed into
consciousness of guilt in the accused for whose sake the vengeance fell.

He stood silent, overwhelmed with the intensity of his own passion,
baffled by the ingenuity of a serpent-wisdom he could not refute.

Ezra Baroni saw his advantage. He ventured to raise himself slightly.

"My lord, since your faith in your friend is so perfect, send for him.
If he be innocent, and I a liar, with a look I shall be confounded."

The tone was perfectly impassive, but the words expressed a world. For
a moment the Seraph's eyes flashed on him with a look that made him
feel nearer his death than he had been near to it in all his days; but
R