s Medon's, as
Volero's murderer; convicting you of his own crimes, as he hath many men
before, by his suborned and perjured clients--his comrades on the Praetor's
chair! I tell you, I discovered but just now, that me too he will cut off
in the flower of my youth; in the heat of the passions, he fomented; in
the rankness of the soft sins, he taught me--cut me off--me, his own ruined
and polluted child--by the same poisoned chalice, which made his house
clear for my wretched mother's nuptials!"

"Can these things be," cried Paullus, "and the Gods yet withhold their
thunder?"

"Sometimes I think," the girl answered wildly, "that there are _no_ Gods,
Paullus. Do you believe in Mars and Venus?"

"In Gods, whose worship were adultery and murder?" said Arvina. "Not I,
indeed, poor Lucia."

"If these be Gods, there is no truth, no meaning in the name of virtue. If
not these, what is God?"

"All things!" replied the young man solemnly. "Whatever moves, whatever
_is_, is God. The universe is but the body, that clothes his eternal
spirit; the winds are his breath; the sunshine is his smile; the gentle
dews are the tears of his compassion! Time is the creature of his hand,
eternity his dwelling place, virtue his law, his oracles the soul of every
living man!"

"Beautiful," cried the girl. "Beautiful, if it were but true!"

"It is true--as true, as the sun in heaven; as certain as his course
through the changeless seasons."

"How? how?" she asked eagerly. "What makes it certain?"

"The certainty of death!" he answered.

"Ah! death, death! that is a mystery indeed. And after that--"

"Everlasting life!"

"Ha! do you believe that too? They tell me all that is a fable, a folly,
and a falsehood!"

"Perchance it would be well for them it were so."

"Yes!" she replied. "Yes! But who taught you?"

"Plato! Immortal Plato!"

"Ha! I will read him; I will read Plato."

"What! do you understand Greek too, Lucia?"

"How else should I have sung Anacreon, and learned the Lesbian arts of
Sappho? But we have strayed wide of our subject, and time presses. Will
you denounce, me, Catiline?"

"Not I! I will perish sooner."

"You will do so, and all Rome with you."

"Prove that to me, and----But it is impossible."

"Prove that to you, will you denounce him?"

"I will save Rome!"

"Will you denounce him?"

"If otherwise, I may preserve my country, no."

"Otherwise, you cannot. Speak! will you?"

"I must know all."

"