He knew not what to believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to unravel this mystery of villainy and darkness; but he felt, with a sickening reluctance which drove him wild, that his friend did not act in this thing as he should have acted; not as men of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath such a charge.

Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word of his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph's fearless expectance, when he had looked for the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure and instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the false accuser.
"Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face of that bill, Mr.Cecil ?" asked the bland, sneering, courteous voice of Ezra Baroni.
"I do.

I never wrote either of these signatures; I never saw that document until to-night." The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came again in his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and unflinchingly the looks fastened on him; but the nerves of his lips twitched, his face was haggard as by a night's deep gambling; there was a heavy dew on his forehead--it was not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly unconscious man; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation.
"And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your occupation of the early evening hours of the 15th?
Unfortunate!" "I do; but in your account of them you lie!" There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence.

Under it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched; and a fear of the man he accused smote him, more deep, more keen than that with which the sweeping might of the Seraph's fury had moved him.

He knew now why Ben Davis had hated with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that slept under the Quietist languor and nonchalance of "the d----d Guards' swell." What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest sign.
"As a matter of course you deny it!" he said, with a polite wave of his hand.