“It is a grand mystery,” mused Di Bello, throwing out his legs and lying back in his chair. “Just when I am ready to marry her she takes wing.” “Ah, _si_,” said Bertino meditatively--“a grand mystery.” CHAPTER XII THE PEACE PRESERVED AFTER Juno’s sudden disappearance the theatre and the _caffès_ of Mulberry lost their charm for Signor Di Bello. He began to roam abroad evenings in quest of amusement. There came to him a newborn desire to explore the region of American life that lay beyond the colony’s border. For twelve years he had dwelt in its heart and felt the throb of the big city; but never before had it struck his mind to know more of this _terra misteriosa_ than he could learn from the morning _Araldo_ and the evening _Bolletino_, two local scions of the corybantic press, which bawled the news of Mulberry in double-column scares, but only whispered in paragraphs of the affairs of New York. With sixty thousand others Mulberry was his world. He had never sought acquaintance with the great American monster whose roar filled the surrounding air by day and whose million eyes at night gave the northern sky a dim, false dawn. From visiting Bowery shows he became a patron of the vaudeville theatres farther up town. At length he discovered the Tenderloin, with its dazzling electric displays at the doors of theatres and drinking places, its phantom gaiety. Resolved to sound the depths of this ocean of lights, he went along with a current that flowed to the box office of the Titania, where the glittering Aztec spectacle, “Zapeaca” was the magnet, charged with “one hundred American beauties.” “By Cristoforo Colombo, it is she!” the grocer exclaimed, as the woman he had hunted in a cityful marched across the stage, bringing up the rear of a long column of high-heeled warriors. Though disguised in a tin spear, a pasteboard shield, and a sheening helmet set jauntily upon her bounteous raven mane, he knew her at first sight. No mistaking that snub nose, that grand carriage, the plethora of her line, the Eastern warmth of her colour. “_Brava!_” he cried out, from his seat near the footlights whenever the row of beauties to which she belonged showed themselves in marching order. It was a renewal of the transport into which her presence had thrown him when in solitary pride she held the stage of La Scala and bleated “Santa Lucia.” To the jeers of the people about him he paid no heed, but gave wild, vociferous expression to his delight at finding her and feasting his eyes upon her, as she stood there in all the truth of the ballet’s scant drapery.