Our life was simple enough, but pleasant. Some times we spent the whole day trying to shoot the only bird there is to shoot--a sort of wild duck; at others we took long walks, exploring the coast scenery, and frequently winding up by a visit to our robber friends. Antiquities or sight-seeing we neither of us cared much about, but we paid together more than one visit to the vast palatial convent of San Martino and to the Cathedral of Monreale. Other places of interest we avoided, for my father had lost none of his old dread of meeting any of his fellow-countrymen, although, as I more than once pointed out to him, the probabilities of their ever having heard his story were very far removed. Sometimes we rode on mules across the rich intervening plain into Palermo, and mingled with the little crowd of priests and soldiers in the _café_, and went down to the Casino to glance through the papers. It was I who read these, however, for my father carefully avoided them, and perhaps it was as well that he did, for more often than not there was some mention of Rupert Devereux's name, either presiding at a meeting or heading a subscription list, or as one of the committee interested in some great philanthropic work. It could not have been pleasant for him to have read such items of news as this, and I was thankful that he chose never to read English papers. And so our life passed on for more than a year, not at all unpleasantly for either of us. My father, in his previous state of complete solitude, had developed a taste for profound reading, and seemed to find much pleasure in studying abstruse works on Buddhism, the creed of the Mahometans, the Confucian teaching, the religion of the Brahmins and the Fetichists, and the strange, fascinating doctrine of quietism held by so many of the nations of the East. It was a taste which I never pretended to share, the only one of our joint interests in which the other did not participate. I feared it, although in my ignorance I could do nothing to check it. I had dim ideas that to a man circumstanced as my father was, such study must develop any secret leanings towards fatalism, and it was a doctrine which he would have many excuses for embracing. But I was too ignorant to argue with him, so I contented myself with keeping him from his books always in the daytime and often in the evening; for we had improvised in one of the empty rooms a sort of billiard table, on which, I am convinced, we executed some of the most extraordinary strokes that a marker ever gazed upon. Then, too, we played chess often, and I tried, by every means in my power, to keep him from turning bookworm. And, on the whole, I was not dissatisfied with my success. CHAPTER XXXIV VISITORS FROM ROME