he Christian and the Moslem; or was
he yet fated to outlast them both, in continuous testimony to a hand
moulding incomprehensibly the life of humanity? Would Israel develop
into the sacred phalanx, the nobler brotherhood that Raphael Leon had
dreamed of, or would the race that had first proclaimed--through Moses
for the ancient world, through Spinoza for the modern--

"One God, one Law, one Element,"

become, in the larger, wilder dream of the Russian _idealist_, the main
factor in

"One far-off divine event
To which the whole Creation moves"?

The roar dwindled to a solemn silence, as though in answer to her
questionings. Then the ram's horn shrilled--a stern long-drawn-out note,
that rose at last into a mighty peal of sacred jubilation. The Atonement
was complete.

The crowd bore Esther downstairs and into the blank indifferent street.
But the long exhausting fast, the fetid atmosphere, the strain upon her
emotions, had overtaxed her beyond endurance. Up to now the frenzy of
the service had sustained her, but as she stepped across the threshold
on to the pavement she staggered and fell. One of the men pouring out
from the lower synagogue caught her in his arms. It was Strelitski.

* * * * *

A group of three stood on the saloon deck of an outward-bound steamer.
Raphael Leon was bidding farewell to the man he reverenced without
discipleship, and the woman he loved without blindness.

"Look!" he said, pointing compassionately to the wretched throng of
Jewish emigrants huddling on the lower deck and scattered about the
gangway amid jostling sailors and stevedores and bales and coils of
rope; the men in peaked or fur caps, the women with shawls and babies,
some gazing upwards with lacklustre eyes, the majority brooding,
despondent, apathetic. "How could either of you have borne the sights
and smells of the steerage? You are a pair of visionaries. You could not
have breathed a day in that society. Look!"

Strelitski looked at Esther instead; perhaps he was thinking he could
have breathed anywhere in her society--nay, breathed even more freely in
the steerage than in the cabin if he had sailed away without telling
Raphael that he had found her.

"You forget a common impulse took us into such society on the Day of
Atonement," he answered after a moment. "You forget we are both Children
of the Ghetto."

"I can never forget that," said Raphael fervently, "else E