Your lordship shall see the bill, however, of course, spread here upon the table; but first, let me warn you, my Lord Marquis, that the sight will be intensely painful to you.
"Very painful, my lord," added Baroni impressively.

"Prepare yourself for--" Rock dashed his hand down on the marble table with a force that made the lusters and statuettes on it ring and tremble.
"No more words! Lay the bill there." Baroni bowed and smoothed out upon the console the crumpled document, holding it with one hand, yet leaving visible with the counterfeited signature one other, the name of the forger in whose favor the bill was drawn; that other signature was--"Bertie Cecil." "I deeply regret to deal you such a blow from such a friend, my lord," said the Jew softly.

The Seraph stooped and gazed--one instant of horrified amazement kept him dumb there, staring at the written paper as at some ghastly thing; then all the hot blood rushed over his fair, bold face; he flung himself on the Hebrew, and, ere the other could have breath or warning, tossed him upward to the painted ceiling and hurled him down again upon the velvet carpet, as lightly as a retriever will catch up and let fall a wild duck or a grouse, and stood over Baroni where he lay.
"You hound!" Baroni, lying passive and breathless with the violence of the shock and the surprise, yet kept, even amid the hurricane of wrath that had tossed him upward and downward as the winds toss leaves, his hold upon the document, and his clear, cool, ready self-possession.
"My lord," he said faintly, "I do not wonder at your excitement, aggressive as it renders you; but I cannot admit that false which I know to be a for--" "Silence! Say that word once more, and I shall forget myself and hurl you out into the street like the dog of a Jew you are!" "Have patience an instant, my lord.

Will it profit your friend and brother-in-arms if it be afterward said that when this charge was brought against him, you, my Lord Rockingham, had so little faith in his power to refute it that you bore down with all your mighty strength in a personal assault upon one so weakly as myself, and sought to put an end to the evidence against him by bodily threats against my safety, and by--what will look legally, my lord, like--an attempt to coerce me into silence and to obtain the paper from my hands by violence ?" Faint and hoarse the words were, but they were spoken with quiet confidence, with admirable acumen; they were the very words to lash the passions of his listener into unendurable fire, yet to chain them powerless down; the Guardsman stood above him, his features flushed and dark with rage, his eyes literally blazing with fury, his lips working under his tawny, leonine beard.

At every syllable he could have thrown himself afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much carrion; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and meshed in the coils of subtlety--the desperate disadvantage at which Right is so often placed, when met by the cunning science and sophistry of Wrong--held the Seraph in their net now.