existing abuses was only equalled by his faith
in their speedy amendment. Love was to cure all evils: the love of man
for man, the effusive all-embracing sympathy of the school of the
Vicaire Savoyard, was to purge the emotions by tenderness and pity. In
Gamba, the victim of the conditions he denounced, the sense of present
hardship prevailed over the faith in future improvement; while
Filangieri's social superiority mitigated his view of the evils and
magnified the efficacy of the proposed remedies. Odo's days passed
agreeably in such intercourse, or in the excitement of excursions to the
ruined cities; and as the court and the higher society of Naples offered
little to engage him, he gradually restricted himself to the small
circle of chosen spirits gathered at the villa Hamilton. To these he
fancied the abate de Crucis might prove an interesting addition; and the
desire to learn something of this problematic person induced him to quit
the villa at the moment when the abate took leave.

They found themselves together on the threshold; and Odo, recalling to
the other the circumstances of their first meeting, proposed that they
should dismiss their carriages and regain the city on foot. De Crucis
readily consented; and they were soon descending the hill of Posilipo.
Here and there a turn in the road brought them to an open space whence
they commanded the bay from Procida to Sorrento, with Capri afloat in
liquid gold and the long blue shadow of Vesuvius stretching like a
menace toward the city. The spectacle was one of which Odo never
wearied; but today it barely diverted him from the charms of his
companion's talk. The abate de Crucis had that quality of repressed
enthusiasm, of an intellectual sensibility tempered by self-possession,
which exercises the strongest attraction over a mind not yet master of
itself. Though all he said had a personal note he seemed to withhold
himself even in the moment of greatest expansion: like some prince who
should enrich his favourites from the public treasury but keep his
private fortune unimpaired. In the course of their conversation Odo
learned that though of Austrian birth his companion was of mingled
English and Florentine parentage: a fact perhaps explaining the mixture
of urbanity and reserve that lent such charm to his manner. He told Odo
that his connection with the Holy Office had been only temporary, and
that, having contracted a severe cold the previous winter in Germany, he