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 positively painful. Sister Giovanna was honest with herself and was broad-minded enough to be fair; her memory had always been very good, she could recall nearly every word of the long interview, and she accused herself of having been weak twice, namely, when she had admitted that she was tempted, and when she had raised the revolver and Giovanni had thrown himself against it. The danger had been great at that moment, she knew, for she had felt that her mind was losing its balance. But she had not wished to kill him, even for a moment, though a terrifying conviction that her finger was going to pull the trigger in spite of her had taken away her breath. Looking back, she thought it must have been the sensation some people have at the edge of a precipice, when they feel an insane impulse to jump off, without having the slightest wish to destroy themselves. If a man affected in this way should lose his head and leap to destruction, his act would assuredly not be suicide. The nun knew it very well, and she was equally sure that if she had been startled into pulling the trigger, and had killed the man she had loved so well, it would not have been homicide, whatever the law might have called it. But the consequences would have been frightful, and the danger had been real. She could be thankful for her good nerves, since nothing had happened, that was all. Where she had done wrong had been in taking up the weapon, great as the provocation to self-defence had been.