Now he suffered, he suffered dumbly as a dog, passionately as a barbarian; now he was met by that which, in the moment of its dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, and escaped his light philosophies.
"Oh, God!" he thought, "if it were anything--anything--except Disgrace!" In a miserable den, an hour or so before--there are miserable dens even in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, where crowned heads are numberless as couriers, and great ministers must sometimes be content with a shakedown--two men sat in consultation.

Though the chamber was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various expensive wines and liqueurs.

Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected this poor place from motives of concealment rather than of necessity.
One of them was the "welsher," Ben Davis; the other, a smaller, quieter man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive-tinted skin, a Jew, Ezra Baroni.

The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally silent; the "welsher," heated, eager, flushed with triumph, and glowing with a gloating malignity.

Excitement and the fire of very strong wines, of whose vintage brandy formed a large part, had made him voluble in exultation; the monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of delighted tyranny.
"That precious Guards' swell!" he muttered gloatingly, for the hundredth time.