ng in anything is an
increased steadiness of the nerves, which quite naturally brings with
it the ability to bear a long strain better than ordinary persons can,
and a certain habitual coolness that is like an armour against
surprises of all kinds. One reason why Anglo-Saxons are generally
cooler than people of other nations is that they are usually in better
physical condition than other men.

A digression is always a liberty which the story-teller takes with his
readers, and those of us have the fewest readers who make the most
digressions; hence the little old-fashioned civility of apologising
for them. The one I have just made seemed necessary to explain why
Sister Giovanna was able to go to her patient directly from Severi's
rooms, and to take up her work with as much quiet efficiency as if
nothing unusual had happened.

She had found the portress in considerable perturbation, for the right
carriage had just arrived, a quarter of an hour late instead of
half-an-hour too soon. Sister Giovanna said that there had been a
mistake, that she had been taken to the wrong house, that the first
carriage should not have come to the hospital of the White Nuns at all,
and that she had been kept waiting some time before being brought back.
All this was strictly true, and without further words she drove away to
the Villino Barini, the brougham Severi had hired having already
disappeared. As he had foreseen, it was impossible that any one should
suspect what had happened, for the nun was above suspicion, and when his
carriage had once left the Convent door no one could ever trace the sham
coachman and footman in order to question them. In that direction,
therefore, there was nothing to fear. The authority of an Italian
officer over his orderly is great, and his power of making the
conscript's life singularly easy or perfectly unbearable is greater.
Even Sister Giovanna knew that, and she felt no anxiety about the
future.

Her mind was the more free to serve her conscience in examining her
own conduct. It was not her right to analyse Giovanni's, however; he
had made the circumstances in which she had been placed against her
will, and the only question was, whether she had done right in a
position she could neither have foreseen, so as to avoid it, nor have
escaped from when once caught in it.

Examinations of conscience are tedious to every one except the subject
of them, who generally finds them disagreeable, and sometimes
p