Herennia was overborne by the calm, commanding attitude of the rival she had meant to annoy.  When Cornelia became not the radiant debutante, but the haughty patrician lady, there was that about her which made her wish a mandate.  Herennia, in some confusion, withdrew.  When she was gone, Cornelia ordered her maids out of the room, stripped off the golden tiara they had been plaiting into her hair, tore away the rings, bracelets, necklaces, and flung herself upon the pillows of the divan, quivering with sobs.  She did not know of a single friend who could help her.  All the knowledge that she had imbibed taught her that there was no God either to hear prayer, or succour the wronged.  Her name would become a laughing-stock and a hissing, to be put on a par with Clodia’s or that of any other frivolous woman, unless she not merely gave up the man she loved, but also threw herself into the arms of the man she utterly hated.  The craving for any respite was intense.  She was young; but for the moment, at least, life had lost every glamour.  If death was an endless sleep, why not welcome it as a blessed release?  The idea of suicide had a grasp on the ancient world which it is hard at first to estimate.  A healthy reaction might have stirred Cornelia out of her despair, but at that instant the impulse needed to make her commit an irrevocable deed must have been very slight.  But while she lay on the pillows, wretched and heart-sick, the voice of Agias was heard without, bidding the maids admit him to their mistress.

“Stay outside.  I can’t see you now,” moaned poor Cornelia, feeling that for once the sight of the good-humoured, vivacious slave-boy would be maddening.  But Agias thrust back the curtains and boldly entered.  What he said will be told in its due time and place; but the moment he had gone Cornelia was calling in Cassandra, and ordering the maids to dress her with all possible speed for the dinner-party.

“I must be all smiles, all enchantments,” she was saying to herself.  “I must dissemble.  I must win confidences.  I must do everything, and anything.  I have no right to indulge in grief any longer.  Quintus’s dear life is at stake!”

II

Lentulus did not go to the banquet of Favonius, to see the unwonted graciousness with which his niece received the advances of Lucius Ahenobarbus, Neither was Favonius himself present at his own entertainment.  They, and several others of the high magnates of their party, had been called away by an urgent summons, and spent the evening in secluded conference with no less a personage than Pompeius, or as he dearly loved to be called, “the Magnus,” in his splendid palace outside the walls on the Campus Martius.  And here the conqueror of Mithridates—­a stout, soldierly man of six-and-fifty, whose best quality was a certain sense of financial honesty, and whose worst an extreme susceptibility to the grossest adulation—­told them that he had received letters from Labienus, Caesar’s most trusted lieutenant in Gaul, declaring that the proconsul’s troops would never fight for him, that Caesar would never be able to stir hand or foot against the decrees of the Senate, and that he, Labienus, would desert him at the first opportunity.