Pieri was surprised, and looked quietly at the nun, who immediately rose and went to the window, pretending to arrange the blinds better. But there are moments when the truth seems to reveal itself directly to more than one person at the same time. The surgeon, whose intuitions were almost feminine in their swift directness, guessed at once why the Mother did not answer: not only she had not sat up with Giovanni herself, but she had allowed Sister Giovanna to do so, and as the patient had not wakened and recognised his nurse, it was not desirable that he should now know the truth. As for Giovanni himself, the certainty that came over him was more like 'thought-reading,' for neither he himself nor any one else could have explained the steps of reasoning by which he reached his conclusion. It was probably a mere guess, which happened to be right, and was founded on a little anxious shrinking of the Mother Superior's head and shoulders when she crossed the room and went to the window, as if she had something to hide. Giovanni saw it, and then his eyes met Pieri's for a moment, and each was sure that the other knew.
'I need not ask you,' Giovanni said, 'whether you are absolutely sure that I must die if you do not take off my arm at the shoulder?'
'Humanly speaking,' replied the other gravely, 'I am quite sure that gangrene will set in before to-morrow morning, and that is certain death in your case.'
'Because,' Pieri answered with a little impatience, 'if it began in your foot, for instance, or in your hand, it would take some little time to reach the vital parts, and the arm or leg could still be amputated; but in your case it will set in so near the heart that no operation will be of any use after it begins. Do you understand?'
'Perfectly. I shall take less time to die, for the same reason.'
Severi was very quiet about it; but the Mother Superior turned on him suddenly from the window, her small face very white.
'It is suicide,' she said--'deliberate, intentional suicide, and no right-thinking man, priest or layman, would call it by any other name, let Doctor Pieri say what he will! You are in full possession of your senses, and even of your health and strength, at this moment, and you are assured that you run no risk if you submit to the doctors, but that if you will not you must die! You are choosing death where you can choose life, and that is suicide if anything is! Doctor Pieri knows well enough what a good priest would say, and so do I, who have been a nurse for a quarter of a century! If the injury were internal, and if there were a real risk to your life in operating, you would have the right, the moral right, to choose between the danger of dying under ether and the comparative certainty of dying of the injury. But this is a specific case. You are young, strong, absolutely healthy, and the chance of your dying from the anæsthetic is not one in thousands, whereas, if nothing is done, death is certain. I ask you, before God and man and on your honour, whether you do not know that you are committing suicide--nothing less than cowardly, dastardly self-murder!'