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.

So Del Ferice was a very successful man, and it need scarcely be said
that he was now not only independent of his wife's help but very much
richer than she had ever been. They l