Del Ferice was a man who was suspected of revolutionary sympathies by the authorities in Rome, but who was not feared.  He was therefore allowed to live his life much as he pleased, though he was conscious from time to time that he was watched.  Being a man, however, who under all circumstances pursued his own interests with more attention than he bestowed on those of any party, he did not pretend to attach any importance to the distinction of being occasionally followed by a spy, as a more foolish man might have done.  If he was watched, he did not care to exhibit himself to his friends as a martyr, to tell stories of the sbirro who sometimes dogged his footsteps, nor to cry aloud that he was unjustly persecuted.  He affected a character above suspicion, and rarely allowed himself to express an opinion.  He was no propagator of new doctrines; that was too dangerous a trade for one of his temper.  But he foresaw changes to come, and he determined that he would profit by them.  He had little to lose, but he had everything to gain; and being a patient man, he resolved to gain all he could by circumspection—­in other words, by acting according to his nature, rather than by risking himself in a bold course of action for which he was wholly unsuited.  He was too wise to attempt wholly to deceive the authorities, knowing well that they were not easily deceived; and he accordingly steered a middle course, constantly speaking in favour of progress, of popular education, and of freedom of the press, but at the same time loudly proclaiming that all these things—­that every benefit of civilisation, in fact—­could be obtained without the slightest change in the form of government.  He thus asserted his loyalty to the temporal power while affecting a belief in the possibility of useful reforms, and the position he thus acquired exactly suited his own ends; for he attracted to himself a certain amount of suspicion on account of his progressist professions, and then disarmed that suspicion by exhibiting a serene indifference to the espionage of which he was the object.  The consequence was, that at the very time when he was most deeply implicated in much more serious matters—­of which the object was invariably his own ultimate profit—­at the time when he was receiving money for information he was able to obtain through his social position, he was regarded by the authorities, and by most of his acquaintances, as a harmless man, 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.