The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, moreover; but his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. He paid a bitter price for the butterfly pleasure of a summer-day love. “Cannot tell me!--cannot? You mean you have forgotten!” “I cannot tell you; it is enough.” There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the answer; its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terrible. A woman's reputation--a thing so lightly thrown away with an idler's word, a Lovelace's smile!--that was all he had to sacrifice to clear himself from the toils gathering around him. That was all! And his word of honor. Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy. “I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil 'cannot tell.' As it happens, my partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour and on the day I specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him the bill that I have had the honor of showing you--” “Let me see it.” The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper. Baroni smiled. “It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the document; both you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician science of fist-attack.” He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that juncture so utterly at his mercy. “You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?” thundered Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. “Do you judge the world by your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or, as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand.” The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He bowed with that tact which never forsook him. “I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis,” he said, as he spread out the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist. Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed across the paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like a shiver of intense cold, that ran through him as he did so, and saw his teeth clinch tight, in the extremity of rage, in the excess of pain, or--to hold in all utterance that might be on his lips.