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 aren't any places like this in Naples, are there?"

"Naple'?" Bastoni said in the same tone of commonplace inquiry. "Liana tell you I go to Naple'?"

"Yes. Don't you?" she asked, a little surprised; and he misinterpreted the slight widening of her eyes—it seemed to him that she was laughing at him secretly. As Eugene Rennie had told his friend in the hotel garden, the Bastoni sometimes sold a ring or a brooch or a necklace to the foreign ladies with whom they danced. The jewel was always represented as an unobtainable antique, a Bastoni heirloom, and after an adroit temptation, the sale was made with the air of indulgent protest. Moreover, the two brothers had hoped to interest Miss Ambler and her mother in the possession of several such heirlooms, though they had even greater hopes than this; but the baron knew that the Neapolitan origin of the jewellery was no longer wholly a secret between him and his brother—the Raonese are devoted gossips, and the truth concerning the Bastoni heirlooms was something of a joke in their cafés. Familiars in Raona, especially Italians, like Liana, might easily know all about it; and the baron guessed that Arturo, for his own purposes, had betrayed him and had warned the American girl. In the morning, evidently, he had begged