Steps, voices, lights, came fast and confusedly behind her; but with the speed of love and terror she gained upon her pursuers.

She fled through the wilderness of unknown and dusky streets, till she found herself, breathless and exhausted, in the midst of a crowd of gallants, who, with chaplets on their heads and torches in their hands, were reeling from the portico of a stately mansion.
The foremost of the throng was a youth whose slender figure and beautiful countenance seemed hardly consistent with his sex.

But the feminine delicacy of his features rendered more frightful the mingled sensuality and ferocity of their expression.

The libertine audacity of his stare, and the grotesque foppery of his apparel, seemed to indicate at least a partial insanity.

Flinging one arm round Zoe, and tearing away her veil with the other, he disclosed to the gaze of his thronging companions the regular features and large dark eyes which characterise Athenian beauty.
"Clodius has all the luck to-night," cried Ligarius.
"Not so, by Hercules," said Marcus Coelius; "the girl is fairly our common prize: we will fling dice for her.