it willingly, except for a purpose so high as to
justify the risk. Sister Giovanna quietly resolved that she would
never see Severi again, and she judged that the surest way of abiding
by her resolution was to join the mission to the Far East and leave
Italy for ever. Having already thought of taking the step merely in
order to get away from the possibility of hating a person who had
wronged her and robbed her, it seemed indeed her duty to take it now
for this much stronger reason. Since she could still be weak, her
first and greatest duty was to put herself beyond the reach of
weakening influences. Giovanni would not leave Rome while she stayed
there, that was certain; there was no alternative but to go away
herself, for a man capable of such a daring and lawless deed as
carrying her off from the door of the Convent, under the very eyes of
the portress, might do anything. Indeed, he might even follow her to
Rangoon; but she must risk that, or bury herself in a cloister, which
she would not do if she could help it.

While she was nursing the new case to which she had been called, her
resolution became irrevocable. When the patient finally recovered she
returned to the Convent, and it was not till she had been doing
ordinary work in the hospital during several days that she asked to
see the Mother Superior alone. Captain Ugo Severi had gone to the
baths of Montecatini to complete his cure, nothing more had been heard
of Giovanni, and the Mother was inclined to believe that his meeting
with Sister Giovanna had been final, and that he would make no further
attempt to see her. But the nun herself thought otherwise.

She sat where she always did when she came to the Mother Superior's
room, on a straight-backed chair between the corner of the table and
the wall, and she told her story without once faltering or hesitating,
though without once looking up, from the moment when she had got into
the wrong carriage till she had at last reached the Villino Barini in
safety. Though it was late in the afternoon and the light was failing,
the Mother shaded her eyes with one hand while she listened.

There was neither rule nor tradition under which Sister Giovanna could
have felt it her duty to tell her superior what had happened, and she
had necessarily been the only judge of what her confessor should know
of the matter. Even now, if she had burst into floods of tears or
shown any other signs of being on the verge of a nervous crisis