Cigole managed to baffle the most dextrous efforts and the most delicate contrivances of Brandon. He would acknowledge that he was an Italian, and had been in all parts of Italy, but carefully refrained from telling where he was born. He asserted that this was the first time that he had been in the Eastern seas. He remarked once, casually, that Cigole was a very common name among Italians. He said that he had no acquaintances at all in England, and was only going there now because he heard that there was a good market for wool. At another time he spoke as though much of his life had been passed in Marseilles, and hinted that he was a partner of a commercial house there. Cigole never made any advances, and never even met half-way those which Brandon made. He was never off his guard for one instant. Polite, smiling, furtive, never looking Brandon fairly in the face, he usually spoke with a profusion of bows, gestures, and commonplaces, adopting, in fact, that part which is always at once both the easiest and the safest to play--the non-committal, pure and perfect. It was cunning, but low cunning after all, and Brandon perceived that, for one who had some purpose to accomplish, with but a common soul to sustain him, this was the most ordinary way to do it. A villain of profounder cunning or of larger spirit would have pursued a different path. He would have conversed freely and with apparent unreserve; he would have yielded to all friendly advances, and made them himself; he would have shown the highest art by concealing art, in accordance with the hackneyed proverb, “Ars est celare artem.” Brandon despised him as an ordinary villain, and hardly thought it worth his while to take any particular notice of him, except to watch him in a general way. But Cigole, on the contrary, was very different. His eyes, which never met those of Brandon fairly, were constantly watching him. When moving about the quarter-deck or when sitting in the cabin he usually had the air of a man who was pretending to be intent on something else, but in reality watching Brandon’s acts or listening to his words. To any other man the knowledge of this would have been in the highest degree irksome. But to Brandon it was gratifying, since it confirmed his suspicions. He saw this man, whose constant efforts were directed toward not committing himself by word, doing that very thing by his attitude, his gesture, and the furtive glance of his eye. Brandon, too, had his part, but it was infinitely greater than that of Cigole, and the purpose that now animated his life was unintelligible to this man who watched him. But Cigole’s whole soul was apparent to Brandon; and by his small arts, his low cunning, his sly observation, and many other peculiarities, he exhibited that which is seen in its perfection in the ordinary spy of despotic countries, such as used to abound most in Rome and Naples in the good old days.