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.