"Father, I am threatened with disgrace."
Then he became severe, reminding her that it was a great sin to come thus and trifle with a sacrament of the church, to come to the confessional and refuse to confess. He could not give her absolution.
"I will come another time," she said rising.
But now, instead of returning to her governess, who was still praying with her eyes cast down, Anna stole swiftly out of the church into the street, where she hailed a cab, and bade the cabman drive to the railway station. She drew down the blinds of the carriage windows, and there in the darkness she could scarcely suppress a cry of mingled joy and pain to find herself at last alone and free.
The cab rolled on and on; it was like the movement of a dream. The only thing she could think of was this beautiful and terrible idea, that she, Anna Acquaviva, had abandoned for ever her home and her family, carrying away only so much of her fortune as the purse in her pocket could hold, to throw herself into the arms of Giustino Morelli. No feeling of fear held her back. Her entire past life was ended, she could never take it up again; it was over, it was over.
In that sort of somnambulism which accompanies a decisive action, she was as exact and rigid in everything she had to do as an automaton. At the station she paid her cabman, and mechanically asked for a ticket to Pompeii at the booking-office.
"Single or return?" inquired the clerk.
"Single," she answered.
As almost every one who went to Pompeii took a return ticket, the clerk thought he had to do with an Englishwoman or an impassioned antiquary.