i answered. 'We were engaged
to be married when I left with that ill-fated expedition. She thought me
dead. She must be released from her vows at once! That is all.'

'It is out of the question,' answered Monsignor Saracinesca, with
supernal calm.

'Out of the question?' Giovanni frowned angrily. 'Do you mean that it
cannot be done? But it is only common justice! She is as much my wife as
if you had married us and I had left her at the altar to go to Africa!
You cannot be in earnest!'

'I am. In the first place, there is no ground for granting a
dispensation.'

'No ground?' cried Severi indignantly. 'We loved each other, we meant to
marry! Is that no reason?'

'No. You were not even formally betrothed, either before your parish
priest or the mayor. Without a solemn promise in the proper form and
before witnesses, there is no binding engagement to marry. That is not
only canonical law, but Italian common law, too.'

'We had told each other,' Giovanni objected. 'That was enough.'

'You are wrong,' answered Monsignor Saracinesca gently. 'The Church will
do nothing that the law would not do, and the law would not release
Sister Giovanna, or any one else, from a legal obligation taken under
the same circumstances as the religious one she has assumed.'

'What do you mean?'

'This. If, instead of becoming a nun, Angela had married another man
after you were lost, Italian law would not annul the marriage in order
that she might become your wife.'

'Of course not!'

'Then why should the Church annul an obligation which is quite as solemn
as marriage?'

Giovanni thought he had caught the churchman in a fallacy.

'I beg your pardon,' he replied. 'I was taught as a boy that marriage is
a sacrament, but I never heard that taking the veil was one!'

'Quite right, in principle. In reality, it is considered, for women, the
equivalent of ordination, and therefore as being of the nature of a
sacrament.'

'I am not a theologian, to discuss equivalents,' retorted Giovanni
roughly.

'Very true, but a man who knows nothing of mathematics may safely accept
the statement of a mathematician about a simple problem. That is not the
point, however. If you remember, I said that "under the same
circumstances" the Church would not do what the law would not. The
Church considers a nun's final vows to be as binding under its
regulations as the law considers that any civil contract is. The
"circumstances" are therefore exactly simi