an, who might indeed injure himself by his
foolish doctrines of progress, but who certainly could not injure any one
else. Few guessed that his zealous attention to social duties, his
occasional bursts of enthusiasm for liberal education and a free press,
were but parts of his machinery for making money out of politics. He was
so modest, so unostentatious, that no one suspected that the mainspring
of his existence was the desire for money.

But, like many intelligent and bad men, Del Ferice had a weakness which
was gradually gaining upon him and growing in force, and which was
destined to hasten the course of the events which he had planned for
himself. It is an extraordinary peculiarity in unbelievers that they are
often more subject to petty superstitions than other men; and similarly,
it often happens that the most cynical and coldly calculating of
conspirators, who believe themselves proof against all outward
influences, yield to some feeling of nervous dislike for an individual
who has never harmed them, and are led on from dislike to hatred, until
their soberest actions take colour from what in its earliest beginnings
was nothing more than a senseless prejudice. Del Ferice's weakness was
his unaccountable detestation of Giovanni Saracinesca; and he had so far
suffered this abhorrence of the man to dominate his existence, that it
had come to be one of his chiefest delights in life to thwart Giovanni
wherever he could. How it had begun, or when, he no longer knew nor
cared. He had perhaps thought Giovanni treated him superciliously, or
even despised him; and his antagonism being roused by some fancied
slight, he had shown a petty resentment, which, again, Saracinesca
had treated with cold indifference. Little by little his fancied
grievance had acquired great proportions in his own estimation, and he
had learned to hate Giovanni more than any man living. At first it might
have seemed an easy matter to ruin his adversary, or, at all event, to
cause him great and serious injury; and but for that very indifference
which Del Ferice so resented, his attempts might have been successful.

Giovanni belonged to a family who from the earliest times had been at
swords-drawn with the Government. Their property had been more than once
confiscated by the popes, had been seized again by force of arms, and had
been ultimately left to them for the mere sake of peace. They seem to
have quarrelled with everybody on every conceivable p