come here, O praefect, but to spy
on us, to probe our souls and use them for thine own selfish ends?"

"Silence, Hortensius!" admonished Ancyrus, the elder.

"Nay, I'll not be silent!" retorted the young man, who seemed at last to
have lost all control over his jealous passion. His eyes, in which
gleamed the fire of intense hate, swept from the face of his enemy to
that of his friends whom they challenged. His voice had become raucous
and hoarse and his tongue refused him service, making his words sound
inarticulate.

"Do ye not see," he shouted, turning his flushed face toward the others,
"do you not see how you are being fooled? The praefect stands high in
the Caesar's favour, he has the Caesar's ear----"

"Silence!" broke in in peremptory accents the voice of Caius Nepos, the
host.

"Silence!" cried some of the younger men.

"No! No! I'll shout! I'll shout!" persisted Hortensius with the crazy
obstinacy of one whose mind is obscured with liquor and with passion,
"I'll shout until you understand. Fools, I tell ye! Fools are ye all!
You tell this man of your schemes, of your plans! He listens blandly to
you!... You fools! you fools! Not to have suspected ere this that his
so-called loyalty to Caesar masks his treachery to us!"

He was kneeling now upon his couch, and with clenched hands was pounding
against the cushions like an angry child. The tumult became general;
everyone was shouting. Those who were nearest to this raving young
maniac were trying to seize him, but he waved his arms about like the
wings of a night bird, and anon he seized a goblet of heavy solid metal
and struck out with it to the right and left of him, so that none dared
come nigh.

But the praefect stood quietly beside him, with arms held very tightly
across his mighty chest, his dark eyes fixed upon the raving figure on
the couch. No one had ventured to approach him, for the feeling of
superstitious awe which he had aroused in them a while ago had not
wholly died down, and now there was such a look of contempt and of wrath
in his face that instinctively the most sober drew away from him, and
those whose minds were obscured with wine looked upon him in ever
growing terror.

Suddenly Hortensius, brandishing the heavy goblet, raised it high above
his head, and with a drunken and desperate gesture he flung it in the
direction of the praefect, but his hand had trembled and his arm was
unsteady. The goblet missed the head of Taurus Antinor