“Well, did you stop to pick up any gold in the street?” asked Signor Di Bello, winking at his sister, and sprinkling grated Parmesan over a ragout of green peppers. “I suppose you have your valise filled with it.” “_Ma che!_” said Bertino, holding up his plate and looking wise. “Do you think I am such a fool? I don’t expect to pick up money; but shall I tell you something? Well, it is this: In this country I shall soon make enough money to fill that valise.” The others dropped their knives and forks and regarded him with amazement. “By the egg of Columbus!” exclaimed Signor Di Bello. “Are you not to work in my shop?” “Oh, yes; of course.” “Then how do you expect to make so much money?” There was no reason for it; but Bertino, oddly enough, yielded to a sudden impulse to repress the truth. Cocking his eye first to the ceiling and then on the tablecloth, he uttered a fib that concealed his and Armando’s darling project for selling life-size busts in America. The coffee served and the maraschino sipped, Signor Di Bello drew the straw from a Virginia and settled for a smoke, while Aunt Carolina showed Bertino to the room in the attic appointed for his use. She unpacked his few belongings and placed them tidily in a small chest of drawers, at the same time laying before him solemnly the parish-house rules by which she governed Casa Di Bello. Had her brother below stairs heard this, it is likely that he would have sent up many a guffaw with his smoke rings, for by him these rules had received little honour save in the steady nonobservance. Carolina had never set her face against Bertino’s coming to the house, and there was no method in the frosty greeting she had given him at the door. It was merely that the sight of him, standing there, bag and baggage, a whole day before the time, had staggered her orderly being and drawn from her an instinctive protest. This all came of her unruffled years as _perpetua_ of the rectory--that domain of peace and even tenor, whose broad, clear windows she often regarded wistfully, looking over the churchyard to Mott Street, from her sanctum on the second floor.