Everything they saw appeared wonderful to them; everything they stopped to examine they touched.

They were vulgarians.

The atrium seemed profaned by their presence.

At the same time, their leisurely manner and the assurance with which they proceeded pointed to some right or business; if business, with whom?
With much jargon they sauntered this way and that, all the time gradually approaching the pillar by which Ben-Hur was standing.
Off a little way, where a slanted gleam of the sun fell with a glare upon the mosaic of the floor, there was a statue which attracted their notice.

In examining it, they stopped in the light.
The mystery surrounding his own presence in the palace tended, as we have seen, to make Ben-Hur nervous; so now, when in the tall stout stranger he recognized the Northman whom he had known in Rome, and seen crowned only the day before in the Circus as the winning pugilist; when he saw the man's face, scarred with the wounds of many battles, and imbruted by ferocious passions; when he surveyed the fellow's naked limbs, very marvels of exercise and training, and his shoulders of Herculean breadth, a thought of personal danger started a chill along every vein.