worked very well.  Del Ferice, on his part, was unswervingly faithful to her in word and deed, for he exhibited in a high degree that unfaltering constancy which is bred of a permanent, unalienable, financial interest.  Bad men are often clever, but if their cleverness is of a superior order they rarely do anything bad.  It is true that when they yield to the pressure of necessity their wickedness surpasses that of other men in the same degree as their intelligence.  Not only honesty, but all virtue collectively, is the best possible policy, provided that the politician can handle such a tremendous engine of evil as goodness is in the hands of a thoroughly bad man.

Those who desired pecuniary accommodation of the bank in which Del Ferice had an interest, had no better friend than he.  His power with the directors seemed to be as boundless as his desire to assist the borrower.  But he was helpless to prevent the foreclosure of a mortgage, and had been moved almost to tears in the expression of his sympathy with the debtor and of his horror at the hard-heartedness shown by his partners.  To prove his disinterested spirit it only need be said that on many occasions he had actually come forward as a private individual and had taken over the mortgage himself, distinctly stating that he could not hold it for more than a year, but expressing a hope that the debtor might in that time retrieve himself.  If this really happened, he earned the man’s eternal gratitude; if not, he foreclosed indeed, but the loser never forgot that by Del Fence’s kindness he had been offered a last chance at a desperate moment.  It could not be said to be Del Ferice’s fault that the second case was the more frequent one, nor that the result to himself was profit in either event.

In his dealings with his constituency he showed a noble desire for the public welfare, for he was never known to refuse anything in reason to the electors who applied to him.  It is true that in the case of certain applications, he consumed so much time in preliminary enquiries and subsequent formalities that the applicants sometimes died and sometimes emigrated to the Argentine Republic before the matter could be settled; but they bore with them to South America—­or to the grave—­the belief that the Onorevole Del Ferice was on their side, and the instances of his prompt, decisive and successful action were many.  He represented a small town in the Neapolitan Province, and the benefits and advantages he had obtained for it were numberless.  The provincial high road had been made to pass through it; all express trains stopped at its station, though the passengers who made use of the inestimable privilege did not average twenty in the month; it possessed a Piazza Vittorio Emmanuela, a Corso Garibaldi, a Via Cavour, a public garden of at least a quarter of an acre, planted with no less than twenty-five acacias and adorned by a fountain representing a desperate-looking character in the act of firing a finely executed revolver at an imaginary oppressor.  Pigs were not allowed within the limits of the town, and the uniforms of the municipal brass band were perfectly new.  Could civilisation do more?  The bank of which Del Ferice was a director bought the octroi duties of the town at the periodical auction, and farmed them skilfully, together with those of many other towns in the same province.