If she had not urged Giovanni to wait some time before leaving the army, he would not have been obliged to remain in the service almost as a matter of honour, yet it had seemed very sensible to advise him to do nothing in a hurry.

Everything else followed logically upon that first step.
It was the inevitable, and it was therefore already in nature tragic, before active tragedy took the stage.

Yet Angela did not feel its presence, nor any presentiment of the future, when she bade Giovanni farewell ten days after he had first been to see her in Madame Bernard's apartment.
What she felt was just the common pain of parting that has been the lot of loving men and women since the beginning; it is not the less sharp because almost every one has felt it, but it is as useless to describe it as it would be to write a chapter about a bad toothache, a sick headache, or an attack of gout.

Angela was a brave girl and set herself the task of bearing it quietly because it was a natural and healthy consequence of loving dearly.

It was not like the wrench of saying good-bye to a lover on his way to meet almost certain death.
She told herself, and Giovanni told her, that in all probability he was not going to encounter any danger worse than may chance in a day's hunting over a rough country or in a steeple-chase, and that the risk was certainly far less than that of fighting a duel in Italy, where duelling is not a farce as it is in some countries.