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.

They walked out into the evening air unnoticed; he had given his consent
to follow the bill-discounter without resistance, and he had no thought
to break his word; he had submitted himself to the inevitable course of
this fate that had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and
his breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doctrine
of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing before the hotel,
waiting for those who were going to the ballroom, to the theater, to an
archduke's dinner, to a princess' entertainment; he looked at them with
a vague, strange sense of unreality--these things of the life from which
he was now barred forever. The sparkling tide of existence in Baden
was flowing on its way, and he went out an accused felon, branded, and
outlawed, and dishonor