“How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil’s total inability to tell us know he spent the hours between six and nine on the 15th?”

“Unable?  He is not unable; he declines!  Bertie, tell me what you did that one cursed evening.  Whatever it was, wherever it was, say it for my sake, and shame this devil.”

Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of leveled rifle-tubes aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty from the man he loved best on earth.  He staggered slightly, as if he were about to fall, and a faint white foam came on his lips; but he recovered himself almost instantly.  It was so natural to him to repress every emotion that it was simply old habit to do so now.

“I have answered,” he said very low, each word a pang—­“I cannot.”

Baroni waved his hand again with the same polite, significant gesture.

“In that case, then, there is but one alternative.  Will you follow me quietly, sir, or must force be employed?”

“I will go with you.”

The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met his own as it was given, Baroni saw that some other motive than that of any fear was its spring; that some cause beyond the mere abhorrence of “a scene” was at the root of the quiescence.

“It must be so,” said Cecil huskily to his friend.  “This man is right, so far as he knows.  He is only acting on his own convictions.  We cannot blame him.  The whole is—­a mystery, an error.  But, as it stands, there is no resistance.”

“Resistance!  By God!  I would resist if I shot him dead, or shot myself.  Stay—­wait—­one moment!  If it be an error in the sense you mean, it must be a forgery of your name as of mine.  You think that?”

“I did not say so.”

The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance; for once the suspicion crept in on him—­was this guilt?  Yet even now the doubt would not be harbored by him.

“Say so—­you must mean so!  You deny them as yours; what can they be but forgeries?  There is no other explanation.  I think the whole matter a conspiracy to extort money; but I may be wrong—­let that pass.  If it be, on the contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has been palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment.  Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the matter further, unless they find out the delinquent.  See here”—­he went to a writing-cabinet at the end of the room, flung the lid back, swept out a heap of papers, and wrenching a blank check from the book, threw it down before Baroni—­“here! fill it up as you like, and I will sign it in exchange for the forged sheet.”

Baroni paused a moment.  Money he loved with an adoration that excluded every other passion; that blank check, that limitless carte blanche, that vast exchequer from which to draw!—­it was a sore temptation.  He thought wistfully of the welsher’s peremptory forbiddance of all compromise—­of the welsher’s inexorable command to “wring the fine-feathered bird,” lose whatever might be lost by it.