give your Mother Superior
such a scolding as she never had in her life! She ought to be ashamed
to send out a nurse in your worn-out condition!'

'I felt quite fresh and rested when I left the Convent in the
evening,' said the Sister in answer. 'It is not the Mother Superior's
fault.'

'It is!' retorted the doctor, who could not bear contradiction. 'She
ought to know better, and I shall tell her so. Go home at once,
Sister, and go to bed and stay there!'

'I am quite able to work,' protested Sister Giovanna quietly. 'There
is nothing the matter with me.'

Still the doctor glared at her.

'Show me your tongue!' he said roughly.

The nun meekly opened her mouth and put out her little tongue: it was
as pink as a rose-leaf. The doctor grunted, grabbed her wrist and
began to count the pulse. Presently he made another inarticulate
noise, as if he were both annoyed and pleased at having been mistaken.

'Something on your mind?' he asked, more kindly--'some mental
distress?'

'Yes.' The word was spoken reluctantly.

'I am sorry I was impatient,' he said, and his large brown eyes softened
behind his round spectacles as he turned to enter the sick-room.

It was not his business to ask what had so greatly disturbed the peace
of Sister Giovanna.

CHAPTER X

When the Princess Chiaromonte was getting well, she asked some
questions of her doctor, to which he replied as truthfully as he
could. She inquired, for instance, whether she had been delirious at
the beginning, and whether she had talked much when her mind was
wandering, and his answers disturbed her a little. As sometimes
happens in such cases, she had disjointed recollections of what she
had said, and vague visions of herself that were not mere creations of
her imagination. It was like a dream that had not been quite a dream;
opium-eaters know what the sensation is better than other men. Under
the influence of laudanum, or the pipe, or the hypodermic, they have
talked brilliantly, but they cannot remember what the conversation was
about; or else they know that they have been furiously angry, but
cannot recall the cause of their wrath nor the person on whom it was
vented; or they have betrayed a secret, but for their lives they could
not say who it was to whom they told it. The middle-aged woman of the
world felt that her reputation was a coat of many colours, and her
past, when she looked back to it, was like a badly-constructed play in
which the sta