so by shaving
off, has sprouted scrubbily during his illness. On the dead face it
seems a mockery, like the _Talith_ and phylacteries that have not been
removed."

A phrase of Leonard James vibrated in Esther's ears: "If the chappies
could see me!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

HOPES AND DREAMS.

The morning of the Great White Fast broke bleak and gray. Esther, alone
in the house save for the servant, wandered from room to room in dull
misery. The day before had been almost a feast-day in the
Ghetto--everybody providing for the morrow. Esther had scarcely eaten
anything. Nevertheless she was fasting, and would fast for over
twenty-four hours, till the night fell. She knew not why. Her record was
unbroken, and instinct resented a breach now. She had always
fasted--even the Henry Goldsmiths fasted, and greater than the Henry
Goldsmiths! Q.C.'s fasted, and peers, and prize-fighters and actors. And
yet Esther, like many far more pious persons, did not think of her sins
for a moment. She thought of everything but them--of the bereaved family
in that strange provincial town; of her own family in that strange
distant land. Well, she would soon be with them now. Her passage was
booked--a steerage passage it was, not because she could not afford
cabin fare, but from her morbid impulse to identify herself with
poverty. The same impulse led her to choose a vessel in which a party of
Jewish pauper immigrants was being shipped farther West. She thought
also of Dutch Debby, with whom she had spent the previous evening; and
of Raphael Leon, who had sent her, _via_ the publishers, a letter which
she could not trust herself to answer cruelly, and which she deemed it
most prudent to leave unanswered. Uncertain of her powers of resistance,
she scarcely ventured outside the house for fear of his stumbling across
her. Happily, every day diminished the chance of her whereabouts
leaking out through some unsuspected channel.

About noon, her restlessness carried her into the streets. There was a
festal solemnity about the air. Women and children, not at synagogue,
showed themselves at the doors, pranked in their best. Indifferently
pious young men sought relief from the ennui of the day-long service in
lounging about for a breath of fresh air; some even strolled towards the
Strand, and turned into the National Gallery, satisfied to reappear for
the twilight service. On all sides came the fervent roar of prayer which
indicated a synagogue or