Soon afterward Juno, an unwonted air of wide-awake desire about her, entered the _caffè_ and asked to be shown the Queen of Springtide. Before Signora Crispina, the proprietor’s peachblow wife, could answer, there came from a half dozen throats the merry chorus: “Long live the Queen of Springtide!” “Where is it?” Juno asked. “She is here, signorina,” said the wit of the company, rising and tipping his hat. “The lifeless Queen has just left us, but her living Majesty is here.--It is yourself, beautiful signorina.” “Bah! Where is the bust?” No one could answer. Armando was unknown in Mulberry, and only three persons--Carolina, the banker, and himself--were in the secret of his destination when he pushed away from the _caffè_ with the Last Lady in the cart. Juno went back to her lodgings greatly disappointed. A dread had settled upon her that this marble ghost would spring up in her path somehow, and foil her plans, after the manner of all well-ordered avenging spirits. It had been her intention, when she hurried to the _caffè_ to sound the rumour about the bust, to get Signor Di Bello to buy it and give it to her. Once in her hands, she would have seen to it that the thing retired to a safe obscurity. The bottom of the East River seemed to her a particularly fit place for Armando’s masterpiece. She doubted no longer that the bust had arrived in Mulberry, and the mystery of its whereabouts gave her no peace. But it was not so with Signor Di Bello. To the mind of the grocer, put upon so hard by recent events, the talk about the Queen’s resemblance to his lost bride appeared now as a hoax which had accomplished its purpose of drawing him to the _caffè_ only to be laughed at. If not, where was the bust? Surely he knew his people too well to misinterpret this latest prank. He knew. It was the first joke of a practical turn that any one had dared play on him since the blunder at the church marked him for the colony’s ridicule. And he saw therein a sure omen that flat insult would quickly succeed the coarse raillery. Before long women would spit at him in the street and taunting youngsters tag at his heels. Others that he knew of had tasted the strange persecution. But it should not be his lot, by the tail of Lucifer! On the Feast of Sunday his marriage must silence every idle tongue. For then he would cease to be that despised of all creatures, a bridegroom without a bride.