“Your love!” now broke in the indignant lady; “even if all that you have said were not basely false, what love could you have for _her_? How could _you_ appreciate her artless simplicity, her genuine honesty, her rare understanding, her candid innocence, any more than the wolf can value the lamb’s gentleness, or the vulture the dove’s mildness? No, it was her wealth, her family connection, her nobility, that you grasped at, and nothing more; I read it in the very flash of your eye, when first it fixed itself, as a basilisk’s, upon her.” “It is false!” he rejoined; “had I obtained my request, had I been thus worthily mated, I should have been found equal to my position, domestic, contented, and affectionate; as worthy of possessing her as----” “As any one can be,” struck in Fabiola, “who, in offering his hand, expresses himself equally ready, in three hours, to espouse or to murder the object of his affection. And she prefers the latter, and he keeps his word. Begone from my presence; you taint the very atmosphere in which you move.” “I will leave when I have accomplished my task, and you will have little reason to rejoice when I do. You have then purposely, and unprovoked, blighted and destroyed in me every honorable purpose of life, withered my only hope, cut me off from rank, society, respectable ease, and domestic happiness. “That was not enough. After acting in that character, with which you summed up my condemnation, of a spy, and listened to my conversation, you this morning threw off all sense of female propriety, and stood forward prominently in the Forum, to complete in public what you had begun in private, excite against me the supreme tribunal, and through it the emperor, and arouse an unjust popular outcry and vengeance; such as, but for a feeling stronger than fear, which brings me hither, would make me now skulk, like a hunted wolf, till I could steal out of the nearest gate.” “And, Fulvius, I tell you,” interposed Fabiola, “that the moment you cross its threshold, the average of virtue will be raised in this wicked city. Again I bid you depart from my house, at least; or at any rate I will withdraw from this offensive intrusion.” “We part not yet, lady,” said Fulvius, whose countenance had been growing every moment more flushed, as his lips had been becoming more deadly pale. He rudely grasped her arm, and pushed her back to her seat; “and beware,” he added, “how you attempt again either to escape or to bring aid; your first cry will be your last, cost me what it may. “You have made me, then, an outcast, not only from society but from Rome, an exile, a houseless wanderer on a friendless earth; was not that enough to satisfy your vengeance? No: you must needs rob me of my gold, of my rightfully, though painfully earned wealth; peace, reputation, my means of subsistence, all _you_ have stolen from me, a youthful stranger.”