a very bold plan, and Matilde did not see where it
could fail.

CHAPTER XIV.

Matilde received on the following morning a curious letter which
surprised and startled her. She had risen at last, grey and weary of
face, with heavy eyes and drawn lips, to face the deed she meant to do.
The sky was overcast, but it was not raining yet, though it soon would.
She had risen before ringing for her maid, and had carefully removed the
paper from the three little cakes of white stuff which she had made. It
had to be done cleverly, for the smaller ones seemed likely to crumble;
but the large one was quite consistent. She had hidden them all in the
drawer she kept locked; then she had unfastened her door and had rung
the bell. It was past nine o'clock, and her maid had brought her a
letter with her coffee.

It was very short, but the few words it contained were exceedingly
disquieting. It was accompanied by a card on which Matilde read
'Giuditta Astarita, Sonnambula,' and the address was below, in one
corner. The few words of the letter, written in a subtle, sloping,
feminine handwriting, correctly spelt and grammatically well expressed,
ran as follows:--

"The spirit of B.M. wishes to make you an important communication and
torments me continually. I pray you to come to me soon, on any day
between ten and three o'clock. In order that you may be assured that it
is really the spirit of B.M., and not a deceiving spirit, I am to remind
you that on the evening of the ninth of this month, when you and he were
alone together in a room which is all yellow, you laid your hand upon
his head and stroked his hair and said: 'It is to save me.' The spirit
tells me that you will remember this and understand it, and know that he
is not a deceiving spirit."

Matilde read the short letter many times over, and her hands trembled
when she at last folded it and returned it to its envelope. A sensation
of curiosity and of ghastly horror ran through her hair, more than once,
like a cool breeze, and with it came the infinite desire for some one
word of truth out of the black beyond, from the one being whom she had
loved so fiercely.

But in such things she was sceptical, and she sought to make some theory
which should explain the writer of the letter into a common impostor.
She could find none. She remembered the act and the words that had gone
with it. Only she and Bosio had known, and he was dead--he had died
four-and-twenty hours after