Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/296

 she threw the whole thing into the oven. She had been waiting all the while. The red hair was Miss Annie Spragg's hair and the parings were the parings of Miss Annie Spragg's nails.

When the image had gone up in a burst of flame, Peppina stirred on her bed and wakened, but when they talked to her she could remember nothing. She had, she said, been asleep in her bed all the night.

She was fifteen years old at the time, and developed like a woman of thirty.

But it was the end of Peppina, said Signora Bardelli. After that the demon claimed her for his own. She had many respectable suitors, some of whom were rich, but she would have none of them and ran off in the end with a corporal of the Carabinieri, who had been sent into the mountains to run to earth a notorious brigand. He was a gigantic and ugly brute, more like an animal than a man. He beat her cruelly and was stabbed to death at last by a man he found in Peppina's bed when he came home unexpectedly. After that Peppina disappeared. A young native of Analo returning from South America said he had seen her there in a brothel on the water front of Rio de Janeiro. She was dancing naked in the midst of a circle of sailors, white men and black men, yellow men and brown men. But no one knew for certain that the woman was Peppina.