the heart and
looked into the thoughts of all these men, what a medley of terror and
of lust, of rage and of jealousy, would have been unfolded before his
eyes.

The plotters were like men who, falling to with axe and pick to demolish
a building, had seen that same building collapse beneath their feet.
They had sat quietly by all the day watching the events, content that
these would shape themselves in accordance with their will. Young
Escanes from time to time fingered the poniard which he had hidden under
his tunic, Hortensius Martius gave free rein to his ardent admiration of
Dea Flavia, Ancyrus, the elder, kept watch over every phase of the
temper of the audience--its apathy, its excitement, its murmurs of
dissatisfaction and cries of enthusiasm.

Only Caius Nepos, white to the lips, sat in terror lest the courage of
the conspirators whom he had betrayed should fail them at the eleventh
hour, and he--branded as a false informer--be left to encounter the fury
of an almighty Caesar, who had never been known to relent.

The speech of Caligula had of a truth struck strangely upon his
hearers. The men who had been willing to wait upon chance for the
success of their plot, now found that Chance had waited upon them. The
thought of treachery did not at first enter their minds. The freaks of
the crazy Emperor were as numerous and as varied as the grains of sand
in the arena. That he should offer the hand of his kinswoman as a prize
to a victor in the arena, was not inconsistent with his perpetual desire
for new sensations, his lust of tyrannical power and his open contempt
for all his fellow-men.

His allusions to his probable successor had seemed futile and of no
account, and they all felt that they had wallowed so deeply in the mire
of conspiracy together, that it could not have served the purpose of any
one of them to betray the others.

The first moment of stupefaction had quickly passed away, and even
before the Caesar had recovered consciousness Hortensius Martius had
risen to his feet. There had been no hesitation in him from the first.
Whilst the others pondered--vaguely frightened at this turn given by
Chance to her wheel--he was ready to stake his life for the possession
of Dea Flavia and of the imperium. His passion for the beautiful woman
would have led him into far wilder extravagances and into far graver
dangers than an encounter in a public arena with a wild beast, and the
momentary degradation of offer