In the first moment of the awful disillusion, it seemed to Bridget that her little man had lost his reason. He had seen portraits of the President’s wife, and after looking steadily a moment the desolate truth darted upon his consciousness that the bust was not of her. It possessed not a single point of likeness. To the turn-up nose of Juno the sculptor had granted no touch of poetry, and it stood forth in all the cruel realism of coldest marble. While the terrified children clung to their mother’s skirts, Signor Tomato thrashed about the shop, beating his temples with loosely closed fists and crying, “Woe is me, woe is me!” He would not be comforted, nor could Bridget quiet him to the degree of telling her the cause of his mad goings-on until she caught him by the arm and commanded that he be a man and tell her his trouble. God had gone back on him, he said, and the world had reached its end. To-morrow there would be no Domenico Tomato. “Look-a, look-a!” he cried, pointing to the bust tragically. “Dat-a face! O, for God sague! Dat ees-a not de Presidentessa!” “What! It’s not the Furst Lady iv the Land?” “No, no; ees-a de last lady, I’m tink. Ees-a lost evrytheen. _Misericordia!_ What I’m do now?” Bridget thought bitterly of the proverb about the angel descending when the devil is out, but she had no heart just then to twit her husband by a sarcastic recital of it, although the tempter put the words on her tongue. But she could not hold back an angry thrust at Bertino, who rose now in black relief as the author of their present and greatest trouble. At sound of his betrayer’s name the banker became calm. He stood silent a moment, and then, with upraised fists tightly clinched, swore that Bertino’s blood should answer. Then he took up again his wild lamentation, railing against heaven and earth. He went over the whole catalogue of his disasters, and closed with the news to Bridget that for three months not a nickel of shop rent had been paid. He had staked his all on the Presidentessa, and now that she had proved false they had no place to lay their heads.