and profit in the
future.

They could not trust the plebeians, because they knew that the plebeians,
in their turn, could not trust them.

The dreadful struggles of Marius, Cinna, and Sylla, had convinced those of
all classes, who possessed any stake in the well being of the country; any
estate or property, however humble, down even to the tools of daily
labour, and the occupation of permanent stalls for daily traffic, that it
was neither change, nor revolution, nor even larger liberty--much less
proscription, civil strife, and fire-raising--but rest, but tranquillity,
but peace, that they required.

It was not to the people, therefore, properly so called, but to the
dissolute and ruined outcasts of the aristocracy, and to the lowest
rabble, the homeless, idle, vicious, drunken _poor_, who having nothing to
love, have necessarily all to gain, by havoc and rapine, that the
conspirators looked for support.

The first class of these was won, bound by oaths, only less binding than
their necessities and desperation, sure guaranties for their good faith.

The second--Catiline well knew that--needed no winning. The first clang of
arms in the streets, the first blaze of incendiary flames, no fear but
they would rise to rob, to ravish, and slay--ensuring that grand anarchy
which he proposed to substitute for the existing state of things, and on
which he hoped to build up his own tyrannous and blood-cemented empire.

So stood affairs on the evening of the seventeenth; and, although at times
a suspicion--not a fear, for of that he was incapable--flitted across the
mind of the traitor, that things were not going on as he could wish them;
that the alienation of Paullus Arvina, and the absence of his injured
daughter, must probably work together to the discomfiture of the
conspiracy; still, as hour after hour passed away, and no discovery was
made, he revelled in his anticipated triumph.

Of the interview between Paullus and Lucia, he was as yet unaware; and,
with that singular inconsistency which is to be found in almost every
mind, although he disbelieved, as a principle, in the existence of honor
at all, he yet never doubted that young Arvina would hold himself bound
strictly by the pledge of secrecy which he had reiterated, after the
frustration of the murderous attempt against his life, in the cave of
Egeria.

Nor did he err in his premises; for had not Arvina been convinced that new
and more perilous schemes were on t