United States or Norfolk Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"Who was it?" exclaimed Lentulus, growing a little anxious on the subject, for though he cared little enough about Arvina, he was yet unwilling to see a Patrician arraigned for so small a matter, as was in his eyes the murder of a mechanic. "Why should he not speak? I warrant you I will find means to make him." "It was my patron, Lentulus." "Your patron! man!" he cried, much astonished.

Ever espying whom he might attach to his party by operating on his passions, his prejudices, his weakness, or his pride; a most sagacious judge of human nature, reading the character of every man as it were in a written book, Cataline had long before remarked young Arvina.

This broad and noble thoroughfare, from its great width, and the long rows of marble columns, which decked its palaces, all glittering in the misty sunbeams, shewed like a waving line of light among the crowded buildings of the narrower ways, that ran parallel to it along the valley and up the easy slope of the Cælian mount, with the Minervium, in which Arvina stood, leading directly downward to its centre.

"Commend me to the boar upon the table likewise," said Catiline; "still, with my friend Arvina at my side, and a good boarspear in my hand, I would like well to bide the charge of a tusker! It is rare sport, by Hercules!"

Of the interview between Paullus and Lucia, he was as yet unaware; and, with that singular inconsistency which is to be found in almost every mind, although he disbelieved, as a principle, in the existence of honor at all, he yet never doubted that young Arvina would hold himself bound strictly by the pledge of secrecy which he had reiterated, after the frustration of the murderous attempt against his life, in the cave of Egeria.

Accepting the first offer, partly perhaps from a sort of pardonable hypocrisy, desiring to make a favourable impression on the great man, with whom he had for the first time spoken, Arvina followed the intelligent and civil freedman to the library, which was indeed the favourite apartment of the studious magistrate.

Go to your homes, my friends, and make no tumult in the streets, I pray you. This shall be looked to and avenged; your Consul watches over you!" "Live! live the Consul! the good Consul, the man of the people!" shouted the crowd, as they dispersed quietly to their homes. "Arvina, come with me. To whom told you, that you had found, and Volero sold, this dagger?" he asked very sternly.

Paullus Arvina was not naturally, not radically evil. Far from it, his impulses were naturally virtuous and correct, his calm sober thoughts always honorable and upright; but his passions were violent and unregulated; his principles of conduct not definitively formed; and his mind wavering, unsettled, and unsteady.

"I caused the funeral to take place this night," he said to Arvina, "instead of waiting the due term of eight days, on purpose that I might create no suspicion in the minds of the slayers. They never will suspect him, we have buried even now, to be the man they slew last night, and will fancy, it may be, that the body is not discovered even."

"Her!" she said, laying an emphasis on the word, but how affected by it Arvina could not judge. "It is then a woman?" "A very young, a very beautiful, a very wretched, girl!" he answered. "And you love her?" she said, with an effort at firmness, which itself proved the violence of her emotion. "By your life!