m; he had threatened her, he had talked of
bringing infamy and public disgrace on the woman he loved, in order to
force her to marry him; he had thought only of that end and not at all
of the vile means; it all took shape now, and looked ugly enough. He
felt the blood surging to his sunburnt forehead for shame, perhaps for
the first time in his life, and the sensation was painfully
humiliating.

It made a deep impression on him when he realised it. Often enough he
had said that honour was his god, and he had taken pleasure in proving
that he who makes the rule of honour the law of his life must of
necessity be a good man, incapable of any falsehood or meanness or
cruelty, and therefore truthful, generous, and kind; in other words,
such an one must really be all that a good Christian aims at being.
The religion of honour, Giovanni used to say, was of a higher nature
than Christianity, since Christians might sin, repent, and be forgiven
again and again, to the biblical seventy times seven times; but a man
who did one dishonourable deed in his whole life ceased to be a man of
honour for ever. Having that certainty before his eyes, how could he
ever be in danger of a fall?

But now he was ashamed, for he had fallen; he had forsaken his deity
and his faith; the infamy he had threatened to bring on Angela had
come back upon him and branded him. It was not because he had brought
her to his lodging to talk with him alone, for he saw nothing
dishonourable in that, since he felt sure that no harm could come to
her in consequence. The dishonour lay in having thought of the rest
afterwards, and in having been on the point of carrying out his
threat. If he had kept her a prisoner only a few hours, the whole
train of results would most probably have followed; if he had not let
her go till the next day, they would have been inevitable and
irretrievable. Nothing could have saved Sister Giovanna then.

As he saw the truth more and more clearly, shame turned into something
more like horror, and as different from mere humiliation as remorse is
from repentance. Thinking over what he had done, he attempted to put
himself in Angela's place, and to see, or guess, how he would behave
if some stronger being tried to force him to choose between public
ignominy and breaking a solemn oath. Moreover, he endeavoured to
imagine what the nun, as distinguished from the mere woman, must have
felt when she found herself trapped in a man's rooms and lo