“Let me see it.”

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 eyes, and his regard met calmly and unflinchingly the looks fastened on him; but the nerves of his lips twitched, his face was haggard as by a night’s deep gambling; there was a heavy dew on his forehead—­it was not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly unconscious man; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation.

“And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your occupation of the early evening hours of the 15th?  Unfortunate!”