alace of light and luxury. Malka's own house,
diagonally across the Square, was dark and gloomy. The two families
being at peace, Milly's house was the headquarters of the clan and the
clothes-brush. Everybody was home for _Yomtov_. Malka's husband,
Michael, and Milly's husband, Ephraim, were sitting at the table smoking
big cigars and playing Loo with Sam Levine and David Brandon, who had
been seduced into making a fourth. The two young husbands had but that
day returned from the country, for you cannot get unleavened bread at
commercial hotels, and David in spite of a stormy crossing had arrived
from Germany an hour earlier than he had expected, and not knowing what
to do with himself had been surveying the humors of the Festival Fair
till Sam met him and dragged him round to Zachariah Square. It was too
late to call that night on Hannah to be introduced to her parents,
especially as he had wired he would come the next day. There was no
chance of Hannah being at the club, it was too busy a night for all
angels of the hearth; even to-morrow, the even of the Festival, would be
an awkward time for a young man to thrust his love-affairs upon a
household given over to the more important matters of dietary
preparation. Still David could not consent to live another whole day
without seeing the light of his eyes.

Leah, inwardly projecting an orgie of comic operas and dances, was
assisting Milly in the kitchen. Both young women were covered with flour
and oil and grease, and their coarse handsome faces were flushed, for
they had been busy all day drawing fowls, stewing prunes and pippins,
gutting fish, melting fat, changing the crockery and doing the thousand
and one things necessitated by gratitude for the discomfiture of Pharaoh
at the Red Sea; Ezekiel slumbered upstairs in his crib.

"Mother," said Michael, pulling pensively at his whisker as he looked at
his card. "This is Mr. Brandon, a friend of Sam's. Don't get up,
Brandon, we don't make ceremonies here. Turn up yours--ah, the nine of
trumps."

"Lucky men!" said Malka with festival flippancy. "While I must hurry off
my supper so as to buy the fish, and Milly and Leah must sweat in the
kitchen, you can squat yourselves down and play cards."

"Yes," laughed Sam, looking up and adding in Hebrew, "Blessed art thou,
O Lord, who hath not made me a woman."

"Now, now," said David, putting his hand jocosely across the young man's
mouth. "No more Hebrew. Remember what happ