in moral emotion, Odo beheld the type of the new chivalry, an ideal leader of the campaign against social injustice.  Filangieri represented the extremest optimism of the day.  His sense of 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 had accepted a secretaryship in the service of the Papal Nuncio in order to enjoy the benefits of a mild climate.  “By profession,” he added, “I am a pedagogue, and shall soon travel to Rome, where I have been called by Prince Bracciano to act as governor to his son; and meanwhile I am taking advantage of my residence here to indulge my taste for antiquarian studies.”