“Oh!  Did I cry out?  Yes—­I woke up suddenly.  I was dreaming of Don Teodoro and of—­” She checked herself.  “Why did you not tell me that your room is damp?  You shall have another.”

“Excellency, if you will forgive me, it would give trouble at this time.  If you will allow me to sleep on the sofa until the weather is fine again.  I will make no noise.  You have seen—­in the morning no one would know it, and I am very well there.”

Veronica looked at her and hesitated a moment.  In the stillness she heard a soft sound.

“What is that?” she asked quickly.

“It is the cat,” answered the maid, peering down below the level of the candle-light.

“It did not sound like the cat,” said Veronica, pushing her dark, brown hair back with her slim hand, and looking down over the edge of the bed.  “It was more like a footstep,” she added, with a little laugh.

But at that moment she caught sight of the Maltese cat’s green eyes in shadow.  The creature came forward from the door, sprang instantly upon the foot of the bed and lay down, purring, its forepaws doubled under it, and its eyes shut.

“It is a heavy cat,” said Elettra, thoughtfully.  “It is so fat.  One can hear it when it walks across the room.”

She scratched its head gently, and it purred more loudly under her hand.

“Excellency, you will allow me to sleep in the dressing-room, just for these days,” she said presently.

“Oh yes—­if you like,” answered Veronica, laying her head down upon the pillow, sleepy again.

The maid bent over her and drew the things up about her neck in a half-tender, motherly way, looking at the girl’s face.  Then she hesitated before putting out the light.

“Excellency,” she said, “let us go to Muro.  The air of this house is not good for you.  It is damp, and you are pale in these days.  In the mountains the colour will come back.  The people will make a feast when you come.  It will amuse you.  Excellency, let us go.”

Veronica laughed sleepily.

“You are dreaming, Elettra.  Go away.  I want to go to sleep.”

The woman sighed softly, extinguished the light, and groped her way to the door in the dark.  Veronica was very sleepy, as she said, but somehow after her maid had gone away, she became wakeful again for a time.  The cat had remained on the foot of the bed, and its soft purring disturbed her a little, because she was accustomed to absolute silence.  There had been a curious cross-fitting of her dream and of the little realities of Elettra’s entrance.  She had dreamt over again the priest’s earnest warning that her life was in danger, and she had imagined that she heard a footstep of a person coming up quickly behind her.  Then, somehow, in the same instant, recalling what Don Teodoro had told her about her uncle’s frauds, she had seemed to know that he had refused the money in the afternoon because there