"And then it has all come out in the daily gazette."[88] [88] _Acta Diurna_, prepared officially.
"Where is it?
Read! Let me see," pleaded Cornelia, agitated and trembling.
"Why, how troubled you are," giggled Herennia.

"Yes, I have my freedman copy down the whole bulletin every day, as soon as it is posted by the censor's officers; now let me see," and she produced from under her robe a number of wooden, wax-covered tablets, strung together: "the last praetor's edict; the will of old Publius Blaesus;" and she ran over the headings with maddening slowness: "the speech in the Senate of Curio--what an impudent rascal; the money paid yesterday into the treasury,--how dull to copy all that down!--the meteor which fell over in Tibur, and was such a prodigy; oh, yes, here it is at last; you may as well hear what all Rome knows now, it's at the end, among the private affairs.

'Lucius Ahenobarbus, son of Lucius Domitius, the Consular, and Cornelia, daughter of the late tribune, Caius Lentulus, are in love.

They will be married soon.'" These two brief sentences, which the mechanical difficulties under which journalistic enterprise laboured at that day made it impossible to expand into a modern "article," were quite sufficient to tell a whole story to Rome.

Cornelia realized instantly that she had been made the victim of some vile trick, which she doubted not her would-be lover and her uncle had executed in collusion.