Though a stone of composure in all the other turns that her adventuring course had taken, Juno lost her calm a little in the haste and flurry of constructing the nuptial gown. As an effect she failed until the last moment to discharge a duty very needful to the success of her plans. The oversight did not occur to her until Sunday afternoon, at the moment when she was seated in the chair of Chiara the Hair Comber, receiving the marvellous wedding _coiffure_ for which that artist was famous. The hair dressing accomplished, Juno lost no time in going to the restaurant and penning these words, taking great care with the spelling, and making sure that the address, “Post Office, Jamaica, Long Island,” should be correct: DEAR BERTINO: Your uncle died to-day. Fly from America. The man-hunters are after you! J. Then she put on the gorgeous purple gown, and called the Garlic Woman to button the yellow boots. And while the bells of San Patrizio pealed, and the people, dressed in their Sunday clothes, moved toward the church gates, Juno waited--waited for the open carriage with its plumed horses that should bear her to the altar with Signor Di Bello. CHAPTER XV FAILURE OF BANCA TOMATO THE banking house and steamship office of Signor Tomato had reached the border of a crisis. Inch by inch the despairing padrone had seen his well of profit dry up. No longer did labour contractors come to him for men, and for more than a year he had not taken in a _soldo_ of commission on wages. Even Anselmo the baker, who for two loyal years had bought a four-dollar draft on Naples, took his business to an upstart rival, and people sneered at the sham packages of Italian currency exposed in the little window. The slow but ever-crumbling wreck had left him at last with only the steamship tickets to cling to; but even this spar of hope failed one day when a ship of the Great Imperial International General Navigation Company was stabbed to death off the Banks, and a half dozen of Signor Tomato’s clients returned to Mulberry minus their tin pans, mattresses, and other baggage, but well charged with denunciation of the agent who sold them the trouble. Thereafter it would have been as easy to get home-goers to take passage in a balloon as to book them for the G. I. I. G. N. C. line.