Her appearance made Veronica feel a little more hopeful, and the young girl said to herself that after all the light of a rainy day was unbecoming to every one, and much more so to a woman of forty than to a girl of twenty.
She did not wish to be alone with her aunt if she could help it, and she promptly invented several little things for her maid to do, in order to keep the latter in the room.

The maid was a thin, dark woman of middle age, from the mountains.

She was a widow, and her husband had been an under-steward on the Serra estate at Muro, who had been brutally murdered five years earlier by half a dozen peasants whose rents had been raised, when he endeavoured to exact payment.

The rents had been raised by Gregorio Macomer, and the woman knew it, and remembered.

But she was very quiet and grave, and seemed to be satisfied with her position.