You can take what steps you will as regards your friend later on; and you may rest assured he will be treated with all delicacy compatible with the case, but you cannot accompany him now.

I rely on his word to go with me quietly; but I now regard him, and you must remember this, as not the son of Viscount Royallieu--not the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards--not the friend of one so distinguished as yourself--but as simply an arrested forger." Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his vengeance; yet, as he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung the insult, he felt for the moment that he might pay for his temerity with his life.

He put his hand above his eyes with a quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards off a blow.
"Gentlemen," and his teeth chattered as he spoke, "one sign of violence, and I shall summon legal force." Cecil caught the Seraph's lifted arm, and stayed it in its vengeance.
His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over the haggard whiteness of his face a deep red blush had come.
"We degrade ourselves by resistance.

Let me go--they must do what they will.

My reckoning must wait, and my justification.