He went on quietly with his short explanation. Mother Veronica had told him of what had happened in the hall; he had known the rest long ago from Sister Giovanna herself. That was the substance, and he wasted no words. Then he paused, and she knew what was coming next, for he would speak of a possible meeting; but how he would regard that she could not guess, and she waited steadily for the blow if it was to be one.
'The Mother Superior thinks that you should not see him,' he said.
'I know. She told me so.'
'I do not agree with her,' said Monsignor Saracinesca slowly.
The nun turned her face from the afternoon light, but said nothing; with the greatest sacrifice of her life before her she should not feel joy rising like the dawn in her eyes, at the mere thought of seeing the man whose love she must renounce.
'We are human,' said the churchman, 'and our victories must be human, to be worth anything. It was in His humanity that Christ suffered and overcame. It is not victory to slink from the fight and shut oneself up in a fortress that is guarded by others. Men and women must be good men and women in this world if they hope to be saints hereafter, and there is no such thing as inactive goodness.'
Sister Giovanna looked at him again, but still she did not speak.
'Though I am a priest,' continued Monsignor Saracinesca, 'I am a man of the world in the sense of having belonged to it, and I now live less apart from it than I could wish, though it is not such a thoroughly bad place as those say who do not know it. I do not feel that I got rid of all obligations to those who still belong to it when I was ordained, and I do not think that when you took the veil in a working order, you dropped all obligation to the persons with whom you had lived till then. In doing so, you might be depriving some one else of a right.'
Sister Giovanna listened to this exposition in silence and tried to follow it.
'In my opinion,' the prelate went on, 'Giovanni Severi has a just claim to see you. I speak under authority and I may be wrong, but it can only be a matter of judgment and of opinion, and since your Mother Superior has asked for mine, I give it as well as I can. You are not a cloistered nun, Sister. There is no reason why you should not receive a friend whom you have believed to be dead for years and who has unexpectedly come back to life.'