When the patient finally recovered she returned to the Convent, and it was not till she had been doing ordinary work in the hospital during several days that she asked to see the Mother Superior alone.

Captain Ugo Severi had gone to the baths of Montecatini to complete his cure, nothing more had been heard of Giovanni, and the Mother was inclined to believe that his meeting with Sister Giovanna had been final, and that he would make no further attempt to see her.

But the nun herself thought otherwise.
She sat where she always did when she came to the Mother Superior's room, on a straight-backed chair between the corner of the table and the wall, and she told her story without once faltering or hesitating, though without once looking up, from the moment when she had got into the wrong carriage till she had at last reached the Villino Barini in safety.

Though it was late in the afternoon and the light was failing, the Mother shaded her eyes with one hand while she listened.
There was neither rule nor tradition under which Sister Giovanna could have felt it her duty to tell her superior what had happened, and she had necessarily been the only judge of what her confessor should know of the matter.

Even now, if she had burst into floods of tears or shown any other signs of being on the verge of a nervous crisis, the elder woman would probably have stopped her and told her not to make confidences that concerned another person until she was calmer.