In the small hours she often thought she heard some one breathing on the other side of the door, close to the lock, and once she was quite sure that a single ray of light flashed through the keyhole, below the half-turned key.

Yet this might have been her imagination.

And as for the breathing, there was a large Maltese cat in the house that sometimes wandered about at night.

It might be purring all alone outside, in the dark, and she might have taken the sound for that of human breathing.

No people are more suspicious and imaginative than Italians, when they have been warned that there is danger; and this does not proceed from natural timidity, but from the enormous value they set upon life itself, as a good possession.
As for what Veronica ate and drank, Elettra was wise, too.