Within the forest there were remains of rock-dwellings and of Etruscan tombs; he would willingly have consecrated his years to their exploration, and led such a life here as Avvolto of Corneto and the Campanari of Toscanelli had led amidst the sepulchres of a vanished race. He would willingly have spent all his time searching in the soil for relics such as were at times found by the peasantry, but his duties allowed him no such leisure. He took those duties to heart with the conscientious seriousness of temper which had changed him from an officer of the palace guard to a political reformer, and had exiled him from all which he held dear. The Gandolfo princes would have been the first to smile at such a view of a steward’s duties; but to Cyrille the obligation was a law of honour. They gave him shelter, food, and wage; he laboured unremittingly in their service. If none were grateful to him he did not complain; greater than he had served mankind, and only been beaten with the rods of the world’s ingratitude in return. There were small, very poor, holdings here and there, scattered many miles one from another on patches of more or less cultivated ground. And in earlier times some wanderer turned adrift by fire or sword, some criminal fleeing from pursuit, or some nomad tired of roaming had made a hut of boughs, and called the spot their own; and in the peasantry living on and by these clearings, the new-comer found his greatest enemies and his greatest anxieties. Long years of license and centuries of occupation had made these sons of the soil look on it as their own; indeed, in a manner, the Latin law confirmed their title, and plunder had become with them a right divine. All his natural sympathies were with the poor, and the creeds of his teacher held them excusable in all errors, and these people were very poor indeed, but their cynical dishonesty revolted him, and their habitual insubordination met and thwarted him at every turn. They cringed to him to his face, but cheated him and mocked at him behind his back. He was sensible of it, and it strained his patience sorely. The ancestors of Alcide and Lucio had been squatters in these solitudes for centuries. They paid a nominal rental in kind and in labour, and did what they liked on their bit of clearing. This labour had been but seldom required, and their payment generally excused; generation after generation had lived in this way, and in earlier times the men of the family had gone with their lord to battle, and the blood which they had shed had been esteemed rent enough for their land.