on. His gaze grew humid; the face of
the young student was covered with a veil of mist and seemed to shine
with the radiance of an unstained soul. If he had been as other men he
might have had such a son. At this moment Gabriel Hamburg was speaking
of paragoge in Hebrew grammar, but his voice faltered and in imagination
he was laying hands of paternal benediction on Joseph Strelitski's head.
Swayed by an overmastering impulse he burst out at last.

"An idea strikes me!"

Strelitski looked up in silent interrogation at the old man's agitated
face.

"You live by yourself. I live by myself. We are both students. Why
should we not live together as students, too?"

A swift wave of surprise traversed Strelitski's face, and his eyes grew
soft. For an instant the one solitary soul visibly yearned towards the
other; he hesitated.

"Do not think I am too old," said the great scholar, trembling all over.
"I know it is the young who chum together, but still I am a student. And
you shall see how lively and cheerful I will be." He forced a smile that
hovered on tears. "We shall be two rackety young students, every night
raising a thousand devils. _Gaudeamus igitur_." He began to hum in his
cracked hoarse voice the _Burschen-lied_ of his early days at the Berlin
Gymnasium.

But Strelitski's face had grown dusky with a gradual flush and a
deepening gloom; his black eyebrows were knit and his lips set together
and his eyes full of sullen ire. He suspected a snare to assist him.

He shook his head. "Thank you," he said slowly. "But I prefer to live
alone."

And he turned and spoke to the astonished Bessie, and so the two strange
lonely vessels that had hailed each other across the darkness drifted
away and apart for ever in the waste of waters.

But Jonathan Sugarman's eye was on more tragic episodes. Gradually the
plates emptied, for the guests openly followed up the more substantial
elements of the repast by dessert, more devastating even than the rear
manoeuvres. At last there was nothing but an aching china blank. The men
looked round the table for something else to "_nash_," but everywhere
was the same depressing desolation. Only in the centre of the table
towered in awful intact majesty the great _Bar-mitzvah_ cake, like some
mighty sphinx of stone surveying the ruins of empires, and the least
reverent shrank before its austere gaze. But at last the Shalotten
_Shammos_ shook off his awe and stretched out his hand leisure