So far as mere money went, he had not wanted or needed it for himself, but for her; and if she had been rich and had married him, he could not have been reproached with living on her.

To persuade him, she had urged that his honour required him to accept a post of danger instead of resigning from the army as soon as it was offered to him, and this had been true to some extent; but if there had been no question of his leaving the service, she would have found him plenty of satisfactory reasons for not going to Africa, and he had not been the kind of man whom gossips care to call a coward.

Reasons?
She would have invented twenty in those days, when she was not a nun, but just a loving girl with all her womanhood before her! If her aunt had not stolen the will and robbed her, she would have hindered Giovanni from leaving Italy, and she would have married him, that was the plain truth.

He would have been alive now, in his youth and his strength and his love for her, instead of having perished in the African desert.

That was the thought that tormented the guilty woman, too: it was the certainty that her crime had indirectly sent him to his death.