e feast should be over, and seeking her, while there should yet be
time to ramble among the flower-beds on the hill of gardens, or perchance,
to drive out in his chariot, which he had ordered to be held in readiness,
toward the falls of the Anio, or on the proud Emilian way.

Afterward, in the whirl of his mad intoxication for the fascinating Lucia,
all memory of his true love was lost, as the chaste moon-light may be
dimmed and drowned for a while by the red glare of the torches, brandished
in some licentious orgy. Nor did he think of her again, till he found
himself saddened, and self-disgusted, plunged into peril--perhaps into
ruin, by his own guilty conduct; and then, when he did think, it was with
remorse, and self-reproach, and consciousness of disloyalty, so bitterly
and keenly painful--yet unaccompanied by that repentance, which steadily
envisages past wrong, and determines to amend in future--that he shook off
the recollection, whenever it returned, with wilful stubbornness; and
resolved on forgetting, for the present, the being whom a few short hours
before, he would have deemed it impossible that he should ever think of
but with joy and rapturous anticipation.

Occupied in these fast succeeding moods and fancies, Paullus had made his
way homeward from the house of Catiline, so far as to the Cerolian place,
at the junction of the Sacred Way and the Carinae. He paused here a moment;
and grasping his fevered brow with his hand, recalled to mind the strange
occurrences, most unexpected and unfortunate, which had befallen him,
since he stood there that morning; each singly trivial; each, unconnected
as it seemed with the rest, and of little moment; yet all, when united,
forming a chain of circumstances by which he was now fettered hand and
foot--his casual interview with Catiline on the hill; his subsequent
encounter of Victor and Aristius Fuscus; the recognition of his dagger by
the stout cutler Volero; the death of Varus in the hippodrome; his own
victorious exercises on the plain; the invitation to the feast; the
sumptuous banquet; and last, alas! and most fatal, the too voluptuous and
seductive Lucia.

Just at this moment, the doors of Cicero's stately mansion were thrown
open, and a long train came sweeping out in dark garments, with blazing
torches, and music doleful and piercing. And women chanting the shrill
funereal strain. And then, upon a bier covered with black, the rude wooden
coffin, peculiar to the