ully 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.

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 t