aracteristic manner, but finally
declaring that to arrest spies was the work of spies, and that Giovanni
had behaved like a gentleman, as of course he could not help doing,
seeing that he was his own son.

* * * * *

And so the curtain falls upon the first act. Giovanni and Corona are
happily married. Del Ferice is safe across the frontier among his friends
in Naples, and Donna Tullia is waiting still for news of him, in the last
days of Lent, in the year 1866. To carry on the tale from this point
would be to enter upon a new series of events more interesting, perhaps,
than those herein detailed, and of like importance in the history of the
Saracinesca family, but forming by their very nature a distinct
narrative--a second act to the drama, if it may be so called. I am
content if in the foregoing pages I have so far acquainted the reader
with those characters which hereafter will play more important parts, as
to enable him to comprehend the story of their subsequent lives, and in
some measure to judge of their future by their past, regarding them as
acquaintances, if not sympathetic, yet worthy of some attention.

Especially I ask for indulgence in matters political. I am not writing
the history of political events, but the history of a Roman family during
times of great uncertainty and agitation. If any one says that I have set
up Del Ferice as a type of the Italian Liberal party, carefully
constructing a villain in order to batter him to pieces with the
artillery of poetic justice, I answer that I have done nothing of the
kind. Del Ferice is indeed a type, but a type of a depraved class which
very unjustly represented the Liberal party in Rome before 1870, and
which, among those who witnessed its proceedings, drew upon the great
political body which demanded the unity of Italy an opprobrium that body
was very far from deserving. The honest and upright Liberals were waiting
in 1866. What they did, they did from their own country, and they did it
boldly. To no man of intelligence need I say that Del Ferice had no more
affinity with Massimo D'Azeglio, with the great Cavour, with Cavour's
great enemy Giuseppe Mazzini, or with Garibaldi, than the jackal has with
the lion. Del Ferice represented the scum which remained after the
revolution of 1848 had subsided. He was one of those men who were used
and despised by their betters, and in using whom Cavour himself was
provoked into writing "Se