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 feel defrauded already. When Pompey announces how much is to go to the treasury and how little to the men, as he will to-day, they will feel robbed and are likely to break all restraints. That is Clodius' calculation."

"This is a tissue of absurdities," Mucia exclaimed.

"I knew you would not believe me," Pompeia breathed wearily. "I knew it would be useless to talk with you."

"I do not credit a syllable of what you say of Clodius," Mucia answered, "all the more since I know the falsity of your aspersions upon me. But you forget how much I love my husband. I have little faith in your wild talk of mutiny planned. But I am ready to oppose the most phantasmal shadow of any danger to Pompey as vehemently as if it were a tangible reality, a dreadful certainty."

"It is a certainty," Pompeia averred.

"I will not ask you," Mucia went on, "how you came to believe all this or where you heard it. But thinking you knew it you must have told Pompey. If warned he can easily provide against any danger."

"That is just what he will not do," Pompeia declared. "I might as well have been Cassandra of Troy pleading with Hector."

"What did he say?" Mucia asked.