“M.  Baroni, I am ready.”

“Wait!” cried Rockingham.  “Where you go I come.”

The Hebrew interposed demurely.

“Forgive me, my lord—­not now.  You can take what steps you will as regards your friend later on; and you may rest assured he will be treated with all delicacy compatible with the case, but you cannot accompany him now.  I rely on his word to go with me quietly; but I now regard him, and you must remember this, as not the son of Viscount Royallieu—­not the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards—­not the friend of one so distinguished as yourself—­but as simply an arrested forger.”

Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his vengeance; yet, as he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung the insult, he felt for the moment that he might pay for his temerity with his life.  He put his hand above his eyes with a quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards off a blow.

“Gentlemen,” and his teeth chattered as he spoke, “one sign of violence, and I shall summon legal force.”

Cecil caught the Seraph’s lifted arm, and stayed it in its vengeance.  His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over the haggard whiteness of his face a deep red blush had come.

“We degrade ourselves by resistance.  Let me go—­they must do what they will.  My reckoning must wait, and my justification.  One word only.  Take the King and keep him for my sake.”

Another moment, and the door had closed; he was gone out to his fate, and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down his head upon his arms where he leaned against the marble table, and, for the first time in all his life, felt the hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the passion of a woman mastered and unmanned him—­he would sooner a thousand times have laid his friend down in his grave than have seen him live for this.

Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser.  The keen, bright eyes of the Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him; a single sign of any effort to evade him would have been arrested by him in an instant with preconcerted skill.  He looked, and saw that no thought of escape was in his prisoner’s mind.  Cecil had surrendered himself, and he went to his doom; he laid no blame on Baroni, and he scarce gave him a remembrance.  The Hebrew did not stand to him in the colors he wore to Rockingham, who beheld this thing but on its surface.  Baroni was to him only the agent of an inevitable shame, of a hapless fate that closed him in, netting him tight with the web of his own past actions; no more than the irresponsible executioner of what was in the Jew’s sight and knowledge a just sentence.  He condemned his accuser in nothing; no more than the conscience of a guilty man can condemn the discoverers and the instruments of his chastisement.

Was he guilty?

Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so as he passed down the staircase and outward to the entrance with that dead resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid look set on his features, and gazing almost in stupefaction out from the dark hazel depths of eyes that women had loved for their luster, their languor, and the softness of their smile.