he
was fair--fatally fair--too fair for a plebeian's daughter, a plebeian's
wife! Her beauty caught the lustful eyes, inflamed the brutal heart of a
patrician, one of the great Cornelii. It is enough! She was torn from my
house, dishonored, and sent home, to die by her own hand, that would not
pardon that involuntary sin! She died; the censors heard the tale; and
scoffed at the teller of it! and that Cornelius yet sits in the senate;
those censors who approved his guilt yet live--I say _live_! Is not that
cause enough why I should join the plotters?"

"I cannot answer, No!" replied the other; "and you, Aulus, what is your
reason?"

"I would win me a noble paramour. Hortensia's Julia is very soft and
beautiful."

The stranger looked at him steadily for a moment, and an expression of
disgust and horror crept over his bold face. "Alas!" he said at length,
speaking, it would seem, to himself rather than to the others, "poor Rome!
unhappy country!"

But, as he spoke, the strong smith, whose suspicion would seem to have
been excited, stepped forward and laid his hand upon the stranger's
shoulder. "Look you," he said, "master. None of us know you here, I think,
and we should all of us be glad to know, both who you are, and, if indeed
you be of the faction, wherefore _you_ joined it, that you so closely
scrutinize our motives."

"Because I was a fool, Caius Crispus; because I believed that, for a great
stake, Romans might yet forget _self_, base and sordid _self_, and act as
becomes patriots and men! Because I dreamed, smith, till morning light
came back, and I awakened, and--"

"And the dream!" asked the smith eagerly, grasping the handle of his heavy
hammer firmly, and setting his teeth hard.

"Had vanished," replied the other calmly, and looking him full in the eye.

"Bar the door, Aulus," cried the smith, hastily. "This fellow must die
here, or he will betray us," and he caught him by the throat, as he spoke,
with an iron grip, to prevent him from calling out or giving the alarm.

But the stranger, though not to be compared in bulk or muscular
proportions with the gigantic artizan, shook off his grasp with
contemptuous ease, and answered with a scornful smile,

"Betray you!--tush, I am Fulvius Flaccus."

Had a thunderbolt fallen at the feet of the smith, he could not have
recoiled with wilder wonder.

"What, Fulvius Flaccus, to whose great wrongs all injuries endured by us
are but as flea-bites! Fulvius, the