Artois played with her for a moment.
“Never.”
Her smile widened. She put up her thin hands to her hair, her bonnet, coquettishly.
“There is not a girl in Naples as beautiful as Peppina. Mother of—”
But the game was too loathsome with such a player.
“Beautiful! Macche!”
He laughed, made a gesture of pulling out a knife and smashing his face with it.
“Beautiful! Per Dio!”
The coquetry, the cunning, dropped out of the long, pale face.
“The Signore knows?”