'The Mother Superior sent for me,' he said, 'and I have been with her an hour. She has asked me to come to you. Are you at leisure?'
He noticed the muffled tone and the slowness of her speech. She sat facing him, on the other side of the plain table, her open report-book before her.
'You will not blame the Mother Superior for sending me, Sister. She is in the deepest distress for you. You must have seen that, when you spoke with her this morning.'
Monsignor Saracinesca sighed, but the nun did not notice it. Now that she knew why he had come, she needed all her strength and courage again.
He went on quietly with his short explanation. Mother Veronica had told him of what had happened in the hall; he had known the rest long ago from Sister Giovanna herself. That was the substance, and he wasted no words. Then he paused, and she knew what was coming next, for he would speak of a possible meeting; but how he would regard that she could not guess, and she waited steadily for the blow if it was to be one.
'The Mother Superior thinks that you should not see him,' he said.
'I do not agree with her,' said Monsignor Saracinesca slowly.
The nun turned her face from the afternoon light, but said nothing; with the greatest sacrifice of her life before her she should not feel joy rising like the dawn in her eyes, at the mere thought of seeing the man whose love she must renounce.
'We are human,' said the churchman, 'and our victories must be human, to be worth anything. It was in His humanity that Christ suffered and overcame. It is not victory to slink from the fight and shut oneself up in a fortress that is guarded by others. Men and women must be good men and women in this world if they hope to be saints hereafter, and there is no such thing as inactive goodness.'
Sister Giovanna looked at him again, but still she did not speak.
'Though I am a priest,' continued Monsignor Saracinesca, 'I am a man of the world in the sense of having belonged to it, and I now live less apart from it than I could wish, though it is not such a thoroughly bad place as those say who do not know it. I do not feel that I got rid of all obligations to those who still belong to it when I was ordained, and I do not think that when you took the veil in a working order, you dropped all obligation to the persons with whom you had lived till then. In doing so, you might be depriving some one else of a right.'