“Prosecution!” replied Baroni.  “It is a matter of course, my lord, that Mr. Cecil denies the accusation; it is very wise; the law specially cautions the accused to say nothing to criminate themselves.  But we waste time in words; and, pardon me, if you have your friend’s interest at heart, you will withdraw this very stormy championship; this utterly useless opposition to an inevitable line of action.  I must attest Mr. Cecil; but I am willing—­for I know to high families these misfortunes are terribly distressing—­to conduct everything with the strictest privacy and delicacy.  In a word, if you and he consult his interests, he will accompany me unresistingly; otherwise I must summon legal force.  Any opposition will only compel a very unseemly encounter of physical force, and with it the publicity I am desirous, for the sake of his relatives and position, to spare him.”

A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows on an insult that cannot be averted or avenged; on a thing too hideously shameful for the thoughts to grasp it as reality.

In the first moment of Baroni’s words Cecil’s eyes had gleamed again with that dark and desperate flash of a passion that would have been worse to face even than his comrade’s wrath; it died, however, well-nigh instantly, repressed by a marvelous strength of control, whatever its motive.  He was simply, as he had been throughout, passive—­so passive that even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamed, looked at him in wonder, and felt a faint, sickly fear of that singular, unbroken calm.  It perplexed him—­the first thing which had ever done so in his own peculiar paths of finesse and of intrigue.

The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it were the judge and champion of his brother-at-arms, felt wild and blind under this unutterable shame, which seemed to net them both in such close and hopeless meshes.  He, heir to one of the greatest coronets in the world, must see his friend branded as a common felon, and could do no more to aid or to avenge him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder in the pine woods!  His words were hoarse and broken as he spoke: 

“Cecil, tell me—­what is to be done?  This infamous outrage cannot pass! cannot go on!  I will send for the Duke, for—­”

“Send for no one.”

Bertie’s voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man exhausted by a long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet.  Its composure fell on Rockingham’s tempestuous grief and rage with a sickly, silencing awe, with a terrible sense of some evil here beyond his knowledge and ministering, and of an impotence alike to act and to serve, to defend and to avenge—­the deadliest thing his fearless life had ever known.

“Pardon me, my lord,” interposed Baroni, “I can waste time no more.  You must be now convinced yourself of your friend’s implication in this very distressing affair.”

“I!” The Seraph’s majesty of haughtiest amaze and scorn blazed from his azure eyes on the man who dared say this thing to him.  “I!  If you dare hint such a damnable shame to my face again, I will wring your neck with as little remorse as I would a kite’s.  I believe in his guilt?  Forgive me, Cecil, that I can even repeat the word!  I believe in it?  I would as soon believe in my own disgrace—­in my father’s dishonor!”