They came to a halt at the mouth of the Alley of the Moon, a wide passage between two tenements that led to a rear court heaped with push-carts laid up for the night. Halfway up the alley a large gas lamp with a sputtering light hung over a doorway. On its green glass showed the words, Restaurant of Santa Lucia. In three dingy rooms above, Luigia the Garlic Woman lived with a lodger known to the public of Mulberry as Chiara the Hair Comber. The latter had her shop and living apartment in the “front” room, looking on the alley, and directly over the green light, which shed its rays on her sign, Hair Combing in Signora Style, Two Cents. The remaining room of the trio had been engaged that day by Juno, who had merely fibbed when she told Bertino that she had been in town only an hour. It was the same humble chamber she had occupied during her brief career of starhood on the stage of La Scala. “I have come here because it costs only twenty _soldi_ a day,” she said to Bertino, “and here I shall remain until--until we can do better. Good night, my dear husband. Courage. Be _allegro_, and our fortune will sing.” “Ah, yes; _allegro_ I will be. Good night, my precious wife. Until to-morrow.” In the solitude of her dreary little coop, while the hoarse shouts of _mora_ players in the restaurant below sounded in her ears, Juno set her wits calmly to the knotty puzzle that the day had brought forth: How to get rid of her husband that she might accept Signor Di Bello’s offer of marriage? A few grains of poison dropped in wine for Bertino to drink would accomplish the needful state of widowhood, but this method, she discerned, had its faults. It was likely to bring man-hunters from the Central Office about one’s head, and detectives were given to putting awkward questions. Moreover, they had a trick of locking up persons whose answers did not suit them. No; in a strictly private matter of this kind it would never do to have the police meddling. That might spoil all. She thought of other plans of removal that she had heard talked about in the Porto quarter of Naples. And while she considered these there darted into her mind one of those mystic shafts of memory that come unbidden by cognate suggestion. It was a Sunday afternoon, and she and Bertino, walking in the suburbs, stood upon Washington Bridge. From the height of the great span she looked down again on the slopes of the Harlem Valley beautiful in the gold and flame of autumn; the sedge marshes that waved to the temperate wind, and far below, growing narrow in the distance, the silvery ribbon of water that glimmered yet faintly in the gloam of sunset. It was one of those Sundays that Bertino brought her a package of bob veal, and she recalled the desire that had seized her to throw him over the parapet. Had she done so in the darkness that soon fell not a soul would have known. What she could have done then she could do now. By this method there would be no police knocking at one’s door and