Now, Carolina had a lively desire to possess the bust, for she needed it in the avenging play that she had begun to construct. Nevertheless, her Italian thrift had not been swamped by the wave of worldly purpose that had of late come over her churchly qualities. To pay the sum Signor Tomato asked would necessitate an inroad upon her savings-bank hoard, an act to which she nerved herself only in the last resort. So she exerted the might of her tongue in behalf of Armando’s claim, holding with primordial logic that the Last Lady belonged to the sculptor by divine right of creation. But the foreman, in his rôle of thief, custodian of the stolen goods, and judge in equity, had a homelier code of ethics for his guide. It took him not a moment to decide. He awarded the bust to the banker on the ground that it was in his wife’s possession at the time of the theft, and must therefore belong to her husband. It was only the _reductio ad maritum_ to which all questions are subject in Mulberry. The upshot was that in the afternoon Carolina paid the one hundred and forty dollars. To Signor Tomato it seemed as if some fairy wand had touched the world and made it a garden of joy. Now they might take away the other pipe any time, and he did not care. His Bridget and the little Tomatoes would not be homeless. In his transport of gladness the rude life about him took on a poetic beauty. The fragrance of Sorrentine orange groves filled the squalid streets; there was rapturous music in the shrieks of the parrots on the fire escapes and window sills; the raucous notes of the hucksters enchanted his ear. To dear old Mulberry he could return now and resume his proper estate of banker and signore. Long live the day in his thankfulness! Never more would he quarrel with his lot. Ah! the grand truth in the proverb, “Blind eyes lose their night when gold is in sight.” Straightway he went to the landlord, got the key of the old shop, and, when darkness had fallen, Bridget and her brood were eating cabbage soup behind the nankeen sail in the revivified Banca Tomato. But the Last Lady was still with them, to the hearty disgust of Bridget. Not yet had the hour arrived for Carolina to bring the bust on the scene, and Signor Tomato, with many a word and grimace of reluctance, consented, under an oath of secrecy, to keep it in his place until the supreme moment. Pains were taken that it should not be traced to its new biding place. Armando had pushed it away in a cart, taking a round-about course from the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian to Paradise Park. Thus it happened that when Signor Di Bello, to whose ears had come the gossip of a bust that imaged his lost bride, went to the _caffè_ that morning to see for himself, the bird had again flown. “Bah! Another stupid jest!” he muttered, and thrashed out of the room amid the titters of a group of Sicilians.