“But you yourself said you hoped I would soon rid you of Drusus,” howled Lucius.

“Fool!” hissed the woman, through her clenched teeth.  “Didn’t you know that all that I said, all that I did, all that I thought, was for this end—­how might I save Quintus by learning the plans of the wretch who thirsted for his blood?  Do you feel paid, now, for all your labours to secure the wealth of a man whose name should not be uttered beside that of yours?”

“And you do not love me!” screamed Ahenobarbus, springing at her, as if to force his arms around her neck.

“Dog!” and Cornelia smote him so fairly in the face that he shrank back, and pressed his hand to a swelling cheek.  “I said I hated and despised you.  What I despise, though, is beneath my hate.  I would tread on you as on a viper or a desert asp, as a noxious creature that is not fit to live.  I have played my game; and though it was not I who won, but Agias who won for me, I am well content.  Drusus lives!  Lives to see you miserably dead!  Lives to grow to glory and honour, to happiness and a noble old age, when the worms have long since finished their work on you!”

“Girl,” thundered Lentulus, fiercely, “you are raving!  Ahenobarbus is your affianced husband.  Rome knows it.  I will compel you to marry him.  Otherwise you may well blush to think of the stories that vulgar report will fasten around your name.”

But Cornelia faced him in turn, and threw her white arms aloft as though calling down some mightier power than human to her aid; and her words came fast:—­

“What Rome says is not what my heart says!  My heart tells me that I am pure where others are vile; that I keep truth where others are false; that I love honourably where others love dishonourably.  I knew the cost of what I would do for Drusus’s sake; and, though the vilest slave gibber and point at me, I would hold my head as proudly as did ever a Cornelian or Claudian maiden; for I have done that which my own heart tells me was right; and more than that or less than that, can no true woman do!”

Ahenobarbus felt the room spinning round him.  He saw himself ruined in everything that he had held dear.  He would be the laughing-stock of Rome; he, the hero of a score of amorous escapades, the darling of as many patrician maidens, jilted by the one woman to whom he had become the abject slave.  Courage came from despair.

“Be silent!” he gasped, his face black with fury.  “If every word you say were true, yet with all the more reason would I drag you in my marriage procession, and force you to avow yourself my wife.  Never have I been balked of woman; and you, too, with all your tragic bathos, shall learn that, if you won’t have me for a slave, I’ll bow your neck to my yoke.”

“I think the very noble Lucius Ahenobarbus,” replied Cornelia, in that high pitch of excitement which produces a calm more terrible than any open fury, “will in person be the protagonist in a tragedy very sorry for himself.  For I can assure him that if he tries to make good his threat, I shall show myself one of the Danaides, and he will need his funeral feast full soon after the wedding banquet.”