The stranger looked at him steadily for a moment, and an expression of disgust and horror crept over his bold face. "Alas!" he said at length, speaking, it would seem, to himself rather than to the others, "poor Rome! unhappy country!"
But, as he spoke, the strong smith, whose suspicion would seem to have been excited, stepped forward and laid his hand upon the stranger's shoulder. "Look you," he said, "master. None of us know you here, I think, and we should all of us be glad to know, both who you are, and, if indeed you be of the faction, wherefore you joined it, that you so closely scrutinize our motives."
"Because I was a fool, Caius Crispus; because I believed that, for a great stake, Romans might yet forget self, [pg 191]base and sordid self, and act as becomes patriots and men! Because I dreamed, smith, till morning light came back, and I awakened, and—"
"And the dream!" asked the smith eagerly, grasping the handle of his heavy hammer firmly, and setting his teeth hard.
"Had vanished," replied the other calmly, and looking him full in the eye.
"Bar the door, Aulus," cried the smith, hastily. "This fellow must die here, or he will betray us," and he caught him by the throat, as he spoke, with an iron grip, to prevent him from calling out or giving the alarm.
But the stranger, though not to be compared in bulk or muscular proportions with the gigantic artizan, shook off his grasp with contemptuous ease, and answered with a scornful smile,
"Betray you!—tush, I am Fulvius Flaccus."
Had a thunderbolt fallen at the feet of the smith, he could not have recoiled with wilder wonder.
"What, Fulvius Flaccus, to whose great wrongs all injuries endured by us are but as flea-bites! Fulvius, the grandson of that Fulvius Flaccus, who—"