see, I have guessed the truth! I
only wonder why you let her stay at all!'

He moved his head impatiently on the pillow. The Mother Superior had
drawn herself up rather proudly, folding her hands under her scapular
and looking down at him coldly, her face like a marble mask again.

'You are quite mistaken,' she said. 'I will deliver your message and
Sister Giovanna shall give you her answer herself.'

She went towards the door, gliding across the floor noiselessly in her
felt shoes; but just before she went out she turned to Giovanni again,
and suddenly her eyes were blazing like live coals.

'And if you have the heart to kill yourself when you have talked with
her,' she said, 'you are a coward, who never deserved to live and be
called a man!'

She was gone before Giovanni could have answered, and the man who had
risked life and limb to save others twelve hours earlier smiled
faintly at the good Mother's womanly wrath and feminine invective.

He lay still on his back, staring at the ceiling, and he began to
wonder what day of the week it would be when he would not be able to
see it any more, and whether the end would come at night, or when the
sunlight was streaming in, or on a rainy afternoon. He did not believe
that Angela would be with him in a few minutes, and if she came--she
would say----

The strength of the morphia was not yet quite spent, and he fell
asleep in the middle of his train of thought, as had happened while he
was speaking to the Mother in the early morning.

When he awoke the broad stripe of sunshine no longer fell across the
counterpane, but lay on the gleaming tiles beyond the foot of the bed;
and it fell, too, on Sister Giovanna's white frock and veil, for she
was standing there motionless, waiting for him to waken. His head felt
queer for a moment, and he wondered whether she would be standing on
the same spot, with the same look, when he would be dying, a few days
hence. There were deep purplish-brown rings under her eyes, which
seemed to have sunk deeper in their sockets; there was no colour in
her lips, or scarcely more than a shade; her young cheeks had grown
suddenly hollow. For the Mother--her mother--had told her everything,
and it was almost more than she could bear.

He looked at her two or three times, fixing his eyes on the ceiling in
the intervals, to make sure that it was she and that he was awake; for
there was something in his head that disturbed him now, a sort of
beat