Her face was grim and terrible, ghastly and stained with rouge, as the shawl fell back upon her shoulders.

She sat up and listened, and her smooth lips twisted themselves angrily, one against the other, as a tiger's sometimes do, when there is blood in the air.

She knew now that she was really alive, for she thought of Veronica.
Veronica had not known in the night.

Her rooms were at the farther end of the apartment in a quiet part of the house, and when she had left Bosio she had gone to bed immediately and had dismissed her maid.
Elettra came from the room to find the household in the hideous uproar and confusion which first followed the discovery of Bosio's death.
Elettra was a wise woman as well as a revengeful one.

By the deeds of the Macomer, as she looked at it, her own husband had been killed, and she had cursed their house, living and dead.