"

The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced
his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper.

Baroni smiled.

"It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner
we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less
mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the document; both
you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician
science of fist-attack."

He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence
to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that
juncture so utterly at his mercy.

"You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?" thundered
Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. "Do you judge the world by
your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or,
as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand."

The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He
bowed with that tact which never forsook him.

"I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis," he said, as he spread out
the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist.

Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed across the
paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like a shiver of intense
cold, that ran through him as he did so, and saw his teeth clinch tight,
in the extremity of rage, in the excess of pain, or--to hold in all
utterance that might be on his lips.

"Well?" asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He knew not what to
believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to unravel this mystery
of villainy and darkness; but he felt, with a sickening reluctance which
drove him wild, that his friend did not act in this thing as he should
have acted; not as men of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath
such a charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word of
his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph's fearless expectance, when
he had looked for the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure
and instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the false
accuser.

"Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face of that
bill, Mr. Cecil?" asked the bland, sneering, courteous voice of Ezra
Baroni.

"I do. I never wrote either of these signatures; I never saw that
document until to-night."

The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came again in
his weary ey