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No, my lord!

they thought,—they believed that! oh inscrutable, even-handed retribution! that was why she had to die.

Yes, that was the reason, I was the man they first pitched upon in Rome. Oh, my lord, you cannot doubt that I refused to do it? I pleaded the impossibility of finding an occasion; they assured me that the abominable design was abandoned, and then!

They will not stop at—at the double corpse in the sarcophagus up yonder. Constantius takes another wife. That is why I was to be disarmed in Lutetia.

One thing alone can save you, my Caesar: you must act before the Emperor has recruited his forces.

What if, of my own free will, I withdrew into solitude, devoting myself to that wisdom which I have here been forced to neglect? Would the new men in power leave me undisturbed? Would not the very fact of my existence be like a sword hanging over their heads?

The kinsmen of the Empress that is to be are the men who surrounded Gallus Caesar in his last hours.