ite purely, her hands clasped simply together and
her glance mistily off, the beautiful, the heroic, the lyrical prophecy
of a soldier-poet and a poet-soldier.

But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

In the silence that followed, a sob burst out stifled from Esther
Kantor, this time her mother holding her in arms that were strong.

"That, Leon, is the most beautiful of all your compositions. What does
it mean, son, that word, 'rondy-voo'?"

"Why, I--I don't exactly know. A rendezvous--it's a sort of meeting, an
engagement, isn't it, Miss Gina? Gina?"

"That's it, Leon--an engagement."

"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"

"Oh, how--how I hope you have, Leon!"

"When?"

"In the spring?"

"That's it--in the spring."

Then they smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest
butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between
them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to be linked up.

Suddenly there burst in Abrahm Kantor.

"Quick, Leon! I got the car downstairs. Just fifteen minutes to make the
ferry. Quick! The sooner we get him over there the sooner we get him
back! I'm right, mamma? Now--now--no water-works! Get your brother's
suitcase, Isadore. Now--now--no nonsense--quick!"

With a deftly manoeuvred round of good-byes, a grip-laden dash for door,
a throbbing moment of turning back when it seemed as though Sarah
Kantor's arms could not unlock their deadlock of him, Leon Kantor was
out and gone, the group of faces point-etched into the silence behind
him. The poor mute face of Mannie, laughing softly. Rosa Kantor crying
into her hands. Esther, grief-crumpled, but rich in the enormous hope of
youth. The sweet Gina, to whom the waiting months had already begun
their reality.

Not so, Sarah Kantor. In a bedroom adjoining, its high-ceilinged
vastness as cold as a cathedral to her lowness of stature, sobs dry and
terrible were rumbling up from her, only to dash against lips tightly
restraining them.

On her knees beside a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from
swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort of
fiddle. Cracked of back and solitary of string it was as if her
trembling arms, raising it above her head, would make of themselves and
her swaying body the tripod of an altar. The old twisting and prophetic
pain was behi