“By night and by day.”
“And you love me?”
“Ah, si; Madonna knows.”
“Still you will not do me this favour?”
“But it is to be the bust of a man.”
“Bah! Why not a woman?”
“No, no; I can not. It would be treachery to Armando.”
None the less, she had spoken the words that sealed the fate of the bust. “Why not a woman, indeed?” Bertino asked himself when she had gone. “But it must be the greatest as well as the handsomest woman in America.” He thought of the picture of the President’s wife that he had seen one night at an illustrated Italian lecture in the Hudson Mission. “By San Giorgio!” he exclaimed, astonished at the grandeur of his own idea. “A bust of her Majesty, the First Lady of America! This is the best thing I ever thought of.”
The next day was one of vast import. Not only did it witness the purchase by Bertino in a Bowery store of a small photograph of the President’s wife, warranted genuine, but it brought to the ears of Aunt Carolina news that made her tremble for Casa Di Bello. From the market place Angelica bore the gossip that was fast reaching every niche and turn of Mulberry—the great tidings that Signor Di Bello and Juno the Superb had been seen the night before in the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian sitting at the same table eating a ragout of spiced pigskin.
“It must be stopped!” declared Carolina, setting her gold-patched teeth. The old bugaboo of a wife arose, as it did with any woman to whom the running voice of the colony linked her brother’s name. “He shall never bring that Neapolitan baggage to Casa Di Bello.”