gly.

"I can never understand why the tea we make here is better than mine,"
she said, smiling. "It is the same tea, of course. But it certainly is
better in your room."

"Is it?" asked Veronica, carelessly and looking down at the cup she held
on her knee, while she slowly stirred the contents.

As though to verify Matilde's assertion, she bent a little, raised the
cup, and tasted the liquid. It was still too hot to drink, and she
stirred it again on her knee. She noticed that although it had been
sweet enough to her taste, there was a lump of sugar, not yet dissolved,
still in the cup: she never took but one piece, and her aunt had
evidently put in two.

Still holding the cup on her knee, where Matilde could not possibly see
it, she quietly fished the superfluous piece of sugar out with her
teaspoon, and bending down again she deposited it in the saucer from
which the cat was lapping the last drops of cream. She noticed that it
was only dissolved at the corners, but she had observed before that one
sometimes finds a lump of sugar which remains hard a long time. The cat
would eat it, for it liked sugar, as some cats do.

Then she filled the cat's saucer again. By that time what she had was
cooler, and she drank some of it.

"It is certainly very good tea," she said thoughtfully. "I think you
probably make it better than I do."

As she drank again, Gregorio's unearthly laugh cracked and jarred in the
room. But neither he nor his wife had seen what Veronica had done. They
were staring hard at each other, and for the second time Matilde felt
that her brow was moist.

CHAPTER XV.

The Maltese cat died before six o'clock. The poor creature suffered
horribly, and Elettra carried it off to her room that Veronica might not
see its agony. But Veronica followed her maid. Elettra had laid the
beast upon a folded rug on the floor and knelt beside it. It seemed half
paralyzed already, but when Veronica knelt down, too, and tried to
caress it, the cat sprang from them both in sudden terror. It stood
still an instant, wagging its head while its shoulders contracted
violently. Then it glided under the chest of drawers to die alone, if
possible, after the manner of animals of prey. The girl and her maid
heard its rattling breathing and its convulsions: its body thumped
against the lower drawer. Then, while Veronica listened and Elettra
bent, candle in hand, till her face touched the floor, to see it and get
it out, a