Cecil, ere the Hebrew could speak, leaned forward, took the check and tore it in two.

“God bless you, Rock,” he said, so low that it only reached the Seraph’s ear, “but you must not do that.”

“Beauty, you are mad!” cried the Marquis passionately.  “If this villainous thing be a forgery, you are its victim as much as I—­tenfold more than I. If this Jew chooses to sell the paper to me, naming his own compensation, whose affair is it except his and mine?  They have been losers, we indemnify them.  It rests with us to find out the criminal.  M. Baroni, there are a hundred more checks in that book; name your price, and you shall have it; or, if you prefer my father’s, I will send to him for it.  His Grace will sign one without a question of its errand, if I ask him.  Come! your price?”

Baroni had recovered the momentary temptation, and was strong in the austerity of virtue, in the unassailability of social duty.

“You behave most nobly, most generously by your friend, my lord,” he said politely.  “I am glad such friendship exists on earth.  But you really ask me what is not in my power.  In the first place, I am but one of the firm, and have no authority to act alone; in the second, I most certainly, were I alone, should decline totally any pecuniary compromise.  A great criminal action is not to be hushed up by any monetary arrangement.  You, my Lord Marquis, may be ignorant in the Guards of a very coarse term used in law, called ‘compounding a felony.’  That is what you tempt me to now.”

The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the Hebrew’s blood run cold, though he was no coward, opened his lips to speak; Cecil arrested him with that singular impassiveness, that apathy of resignation which had characterized his whole conduct throughout, save at a few brief moments.

“Make no opposition.  The man is acting but in his own justification.  I will wait for mine.  To resist would be to degrade us with a bully’s brawl; they have the law with them.  Let it take its course.”

The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes; he felt blind—­the room seemed to reel with him.

“Oh, God! that you——­”

He could not finish the words.  That his comrade, his friend, one of his own corps, of his own world, should be arrested like the blackest thief in Whitechapel or in the Rue du Temple!

Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearning—­infinitely gentle; a shudder shook him all through his limbs.  He hesitated a moment, then he stretched out his hand.

“Will you take it—­still?”

Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in both of the Seraph’s.

“Take it?  Before all the world—­always, come what will.”

His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang clear as the ring of silver, though there was the tremor of emotion in it.  He had forgotten the Hebrew’s presence; he had forgotten all save his friend and his friend’s extremity.  Cecil did not answer; if he had done so, all the courage, all the calm, all the control that pride and breeding alike sustained in him, would have been shattered down to weakness; his hand closed fast in his companion’s, his eyes met his once in a look of gratitude that pierced the heart of the other like a knife; then he turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity.