She walked more and more cautiously as she came to the other end of the long apartment, where Veronica lived, and she stopped in a dark corridor before the door of Elettra’s room.  It was not ajar this time, but closed.  Matilde did not hesitate, and began to turn the handle very slowly.  Then she pushed the door and looked in, shading her candle with her hand, from her eyes, so as to look over it.  She had determined, if she found the woman in bed, to wake her boldly, to say that she felt ill again and to tell her to go and heat some water.  That would have taken some time.  But Elettra was not there, and the bed, as usual of late, was untouched.

Matilde looked about her hastily, at the same time extracting the package from the wide pocket of her dressing-gown.  The furniture was scant and simple—­the bed, a table covered with things belonging to Veronica, beside which lay sewing-materials, two chairs, a shabby chest of drawers, a deal washstand—­that was all.  Italian servants are not accustomed to very luxurious quarters.  A couple of coarse, uncoloured prints of saints were tacked to the wall over the bed, and a bit of a dusty olive branch, from the last Palm Sunday, nine months ago, was stuck behind one of them.

Matilde looked about her, and hesitated a moment.  Then, setting the candlestick down, she knelt upon the floor, and thrust the package as far as she could under the chest of drawers.  Of all the things she had to do, in the course of that night and the following day, this was the only one with which any danger was connected, for at any moment Elettra might have come from Veronica’s room to her own.  The thing was possible, but not probable, between three and four o’clock in the morning.  It did not happen, and when Matilde left the room and softly closed the door behind her, all was safe.

Before she went to bed, she entered the dining-room, poured herself out a glass of strong Sicilian wine from a decanter on the sideboard and drank it at a draught, for she was very tired.  She left the decanter and the glass on the table, so that any one might see them.  If by any remote possibility some wakeful person had chanced to hear her moving about in the night, she would say that she had felt ill, and had left her room in order to find the stimulant.  She thought of every possible detail which could in any way hereafter be brought up in evidence.

At last she went back to her room, unlocked the door, and locked herself in.

Her plan was simple, though the details of it were complicated, so far as the preparation was concerned.  It was an extremely bold plan, but one not at all likely to fail in the execution.  Almost all the difficulty had lain in the preparations, and she had spared no pains and no suffering for herself, in the preliminaries.

She knew the story of Elettra’s husband very well, and of how he had been murdered by peasants near Muro in trying to collect the exorbitant rents Macomer had attempted to exact.  She was a good enough judge of character to see that Elettra had the revengeful disposition common to many of the southern hill people, and the woman’s dark complexion, sombre eyes, and thin frame would all help to strengthen the impression in the mind of an unprejudiced judge.