She got upon her feet, and together, without much difficulty, the two dragged the chest of drawers away from the wall, and then bent down behind it, with the candle, to look at the dead animal.

“It is quite dead,” said Elettra.  “Poor beast!  What can have happened to it?” Veronica was really sorry, but of the two the maid had been the more fond of the cat.  “It must have eaten something.”

Elettra looked up, suspiciously, and Veronica drew back a step, half straightening herself.  Her foot touched something close to the wall.  She stooped again and picked up the package of rat-poison which Matilda had hidden under the chest of drawers on the previous night.  She looked at it closely.  It had evidently not lain long where she had found it, for there was no dust on it, and the coarse paper had an unmistakably fresh look.  The indication of the contents was written upon it in ink, in illiterate characters.

“It is rat-poison!” exclaimed Veronica.  “The cat must have eaten some of it!  How did it come here?”

She looked at her maid curiously.

“The cat could not have wrapped it up and folded in the ends of the paper,” observed Elettra.

“That is true.”

They looked at each other, in considerable astonishment.  Then they talked about it.  Veronica asked whether Elettra had complained that there were mice in her room, and whether some stupid servant, having a package of rat-poison at hand, had not stuck it under the chest of drawers, not even thinking of opening the paper.  Elettra was suspicious.

“At all events, Excellency,” she said, “remember that you found it, and that it was carefully closed.”

Suddenly, as they were speaking together, Veronica’s face changed, and she grasped the corner of the piece of furniture convulsively.  Though she had taken the poisoned lump from her cup in time to save her life, enough had been dissolved already to make her very ill.

Again there was dire confusion and fear in the Palazzo Macomer, by night.  It was a wholesale poisoning.  Veronica, Matilde, and Gregorio were all seized nearly at the same time.

Several of the servants left the house within half an hour after it was known that their masters were all poisoned.  Within a fortnight, Bosio Macomer had killed himself and there had been two poisonings.  Matilde’s maid and a housemaid, the cook, and the butler went quietly to their several rooms, took the most valuable of their own possessions, and slipped out.  They felt that the house was doomed, with every one in it.  But some one had gone for the doctor, and he arrived in a short time.  Matilde, to whom all the proper antidotes had been given on the previous day, might have taken them at once, but in the first place, weak and still suffering the consequence of the first dangerous experiment, she was almost unconscious with pain, and secondly, if she had taken an antidote herself, it would have seemed strange that she should not administer it to Veronica, or at least send some one to the young girl to do so.  Gregorio lay howling with pain in his room.  But Matilde had warned him that it would come, after they had left Veronica’s room together, and he knew that everything depended on his not hinting at the truth.