The proud woman who had thus once humbled herself for an object she thought good, had never referred to her action again.  She had never spoken of her position to Padre Filippo, so that the monk wondered and admired her steadfastness.  If she suffered, it was in silence, without comment and without complaint, and so she would have suffered to the end.  But it had been ordered otherwise.  For months she had known that the interest she felt in Giovanni Saracinesca was increasing:  she had choked it down, had done all in her power to prove herself indifferent to him; but at last the crisis had come.  When he spoke to her of his marriage, she had felt—­she knew now that it was so—­that she loved him.  The very word, as she repeated it to herself, rang like an awful, almost incomprehensible, accusation of evil in her ears.  One moment she stood at the top of the steps outside the church, looking down at the bare straggling trees below, and upward to the grey sky, against which the lofty eaves of the Palazzo Barberini stood out sharply defined.  The weather had changed again, and a soft southerly wind was blowing the spray of the fountain half across the piazza.  Corona paused, her graceful figure half leaning against the stone doorpost of the church, her hand upon the heavy leathern curtain in the act to lift it; and as she stood there, a desperate temptation assailed her.  It seemed desperate to her—­to many another woman it would have appeared only the natural course to pursue—­to turn her back upon the church, to put off the hard moment of confession, to go down again into the city, and to say to herself that there was no harm in seeing Don Giovanni, provided she never let him speak of love.  Why should he speak of it?  Had she any reason to suppose there was danger to her in anything he meant to say?  Had he ever, by word or deed, betrayed that interest in her which she knew in herself was love for him?  Had he ever?—­ah yes!  It was only the night before last that he had asked her advice, had besought her to advise him not to marry another, had suffered his arm to tremble when she laid her hand upon it.  In the quick remembrance that he too had shown some feeling, there was a sudden burst of joy such as Corona had never felt, and a moment later she knew it and was afraid.  It was true, then.  At the very time when she was most oppressed with the sense of her fault in loving him, there was an inward rejoicing in her heart at the bare thought that she loved him.  Could a woman fall lower, she asked herself—­lower than to delight in what she knew to be most bad?  And yet it was such a poor little thrill of pleasure after all; but it was the first she had ever known.  To turn away and reflect for a few days would be so easy!  It would be so sweet to think of it, even though the excuse for thinking of Giovanni should be a good determination to root him from her life.  It would be so sweet to drive again alone among the trees that very afternoon, and to weigh the salvation of her soul in the balance