“I hope that he will not torment me so much after this,” said Giuditta.  “I have lost my sleep for several nights.”

Matilde, believing that the somnambulist was one person when awake and quite another when asleep, did not care to enter into conversation with her in her present state.  The vivid, terrible future of the day returned to her mind, too.  She had been momentarily unstrung and was in haste to be gone and to be alone.  She had her purse in her hand, and stood still a moment, hesitating.

“I generally ask twenty-five francs for a consultation,” said Giuditta.  “But I am so much obliged to you for coming to free me from this obsession, that I shall not charge anything to-day.”

“No,” answered Matilde, quietly.  “I am not accustomed to receiving anything without paying for it.  But I thank you.”

She laid the money upon the polished table, beside the volumes in their gilt bindings.

“Very well,” said Giuditta.  “If you desire it, I thank you.  If you should wish to come again, I am always to be found between ten and three o’clock.”

“I will come again,” answered Matilde.

She passed through the door while Giuditta held it open for her, and in the passage she was met by the one-eyed woman.  But she was more unnerved and less observant than Bosio had been, and she did not notice the extraordinary resemblance between the colour of the woman’s one eye and that of Giuditta’s two.  She descended the stairs slowly, feeling dizzy at the turnings, but steadying herself as she went down each straight flight.  She made her way quickly to the nearest large thoroughfare and took the first passing cab to get home, for she felt that she had not strength left to walk much more on that day.

She had a moment of weakness and doubt, as she went up her own stairs, knowing that in half an hour she must sit down to table with Gregorio and with Veronica.  It would be the last time, for Veronica would never sit down with them again.  She had not realized exactly how it was to be.  Henceforth, at that table, two places were to be vacant, of two persons dead within a fortnight, the one by his own hand, the other by hers; and from that day, when she and her husband sat there, the shadows of those two would be between them always.

She paused on the staircase, and steadied herself with her hand against the wall.  She knew that from now until it was done, she should have no moment in which she could allow herself the pitiful luxury of feeling weak.  And as she stood there, and thought of the strange messages she had but now received from beyond the grave, she felt the terror of what the dead man’s spirit might say to her when all was done, and Veronica lay dead in her own room upstairs—­in this coming night.