.

DIPLOMACY.

Pacuvius Calavius sat in the atrium of his house. Black robed from
head to foot, with hair and beard untrimmed and uncombed, and face and
hands foul with dirt, he rocked to and fro and groaned. From time to
time he ran his fingers through beard and hair, and uttered the
measured cry of the Greek mourners.

An hour before, one of the senators had stolen furtively in, and,
having hurriedly related the grewsome scene just enacted in the Forum,
had sneaked out again as if he were a spy passing through hostile
lines. None other of the friends of the afflicted father had ventured
to bear or send a message of condolence. It was as if the house of the
once acknowledged leader had been marked for the pestilence--and no
pestilence was more to be shunned than the deadly blight of broken
power. Even the slaves shifted about in embarrassed silence, offered
little service, and obeyed as if conscious that obedience was something
of an indiscretion, and was liable at any moment to become a crime.
Some had slipped away to their quarters, and had begun to discuss the
relative possibilities of freedom, wholesale execution, or a new
master, when the coming blow should fall upon this one.

To Marcia, on the other hand, had been born a feeling of sympathy for
her host, that, for the present, overcame the contempt with which he
had inspired her--a contempt scarcely lessened by the repulsive
ostentation of his mourning. She alone ventured to minister to his
wants and to beg him to partake of food and drink. Perhaps her
attitude was due in a measure to the horror with which she herself had
listened to the morning's news. To be sure, she had not admired the
character of Perolla. It had in it too much of the weakness and
puerility engendered by the bastard Greek culture fashionable in lower
Italy, and which naturally attained its most offensive form in the
towns of Italian origin. Still, he had been faithful to Rome, and
there was something within that told her his madness and ruin were not
entirely disconnected with her own personality. Word, too, had just
been brought her that both Ligurius and Caipor had died of their
injuries. They had seemed on the road to recovery when she visited
them on the previous day, and this sudden misfortune filled her with
new forebodings, mingled with a suspicion too horrible to dwell upon.
As for Decius Magius, she had barely seen him, yet she had felt him to
be one of all others u