ss. If she suffered, it was in silence, without
comment and without complaint, and so she would have suffered to the end.
But it had been ordered otherwise. For months she had known that the
interest she felt in Giovanni Saracinesca was increasing: she had choked
it down, had done all in her power to prove herself indifferent to him;
but at last the crisis had come. When he spoke to her of his marriage,
she had felt--she knew now that it was so--that she loved him. The very
word, as she repeated it to herself, rang like an awful, almost
incomprehensible, accusation of evil in her ears. One moment she stood at
the top of the steps outside the church, looking down at the bare
straggling trees below, and upward to the grey sky, against which the
lofty eaves of the Palazzo Barberini stood out sharply defined. The
weather had changed again, and a soft southerly wind was blowing the
spray of the fountain half across the piazza. Corona paused, her graceful
figure half leaning against the stone doorpost of the church, her hand
upon the heavy leathern curtain in the act to lift it; and as she stood
there, a desperate temptation assailed her. It seemed desperate to
her--to many another woman it would have appeared only the natural course
to pursue--to turn her back upon the church, to put off the hard moment
of confession, to go down again into the city, and to say to herself that
there was no harm in seeing Don Giovanni, provided she never let him
speak of love. Why should he speak of it? Had she any reason to suppose
there was danger to her in anything he meant to say? Had he ever, by word
or deed, betrayed that interest in her which she knew in herself was love
for him? Had he ever?--ah yes! It was only the night before last that he
had asked her advice, had besought her to advise him not to marry
another, had suffered his arm to tremble when she laid her hand upon it.
In the quick remembrance that he too had shown some feeling, there was a
sudden burst of joy such as Corona had never felt, and a moment later she
knew it and was afraid. It was true, then. At the very time when she was
most oppressed with the sense of her fault in loving him, there was an
inward rejoicing in her heart at the bare thought that she loved him.
Could a woman fall lower, she asked herself--lower than to delight in
what she knew to be most bad? And yet it was such a poor little thrill of
pleasure after all; but it was the first she had ever known. To tu