"All that he asks! But fear not, he shall wed her, when our plans shall be crowned with triumph!" "Will you swear it?" "By all the Gods! he shall! by all the Furies, if you will, by Earth, and Heaven, and Hades!" "I will go," she replied, something reassured, "and prepare her for the task!" "The task!" he muttered with his habitual sneer. "Daintily worded, fair one; but it will not, I fancy, prove a hard one; Paullus is young and handsome; and our soft Lucia has, methinks, something of her mother’s yielding tenderness." "Do you reproach me with it, Sergius?" "Nay! rather I adore thee for it, loveliest one; but go and prepare our Lucia." Then, as she left the room, the dark scowl settled down on his black brow, and he clinched his hand as he said— "She waxes stubborn—let her beware! She is not half so young as she was; and her beauty wanes as fast as my passion for it; let her beware how she crosses me!" While he was speaking yet a slave entered, and announced that Paullus Cæcilius Arvina had arrived, and Curius, and the noble Fulvia; and as he received the tidings the frown passed away from the brow of the conspirator, and putting on his mask of smooth, smiling dissimulation, he went forth to meet his guests. They were assembled in the tablinum, or saloon, Arvina clad in a violet colored tunic, sprinkled with flowers in their natural hues, and Curius—a slight keen-looking man, with a wild, proud expression, giving a sort of interest to a countenance haggard from the excitement of passion, in one of rich crimson, fringed at the wrists and neck with gold. Fulvia, his paramour, a woman famed throughout Rome alike for her licentiousness and beauty, was hanging on his arm, glittering with chains and carcanets, and bracelets of the costliest gems, in her fair bosom all too much displayed for a matron’s modesty; on her round dazzling arms; about her swan-like neck; wreathed in the profuse tresses of her golden hair—for she was that unusual and much admired being, an Italian blonde—and, spanning the circumference of her slight waist. She was, indeed, a creature exquisitely bright and lovely, with such an air of mild and angelic candor pervading her whole face, that you would have sworn her the most innocent, the purest of her sex. Alas! that she was indeed almost the vilest! that she was that rare monster, a woman, who, linked with every crime and baseness that can almost unsex a woman, preserves yet in its height, one eminent and noble virtue, one half-redeeming trait amidst all her infamy, in her proud love of country! Name, honor, virtue, conscience, womanhood, truth, piety, all, all, were sacrificed to her rebellious passions. But to her love of country she could have sacrificed those very passions! That frail abandoned wretch was still a Roman—might have been in a purer age a heroine of Rome’s most glorious.