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 she had touched his hair and had said:  ’It is to save me.’  And she knew him well.  He was not, under any circumstances, a man to speak of such things to a third person.  Then, how did this Giuditta Astarita know what Matilde had said and done?  It was not natural, and not natural meant supernatural—­supernatural meant the possibility of communication, and she had loved the dead man with all her big, sinful soul.

It would be long before the time came for the deed, in the late afternoon, and the terrible day must be disposed of in some way or other.  She was not afraid of going mad, nor of losing her nerve, nor of making a mistake at the last moment, but even to her courage and strength the hours before her were hours of fear.