very minute to listen to footsteps or the voice
of the wind without. The joyous holiness of the Festival was troubled, a
black cloud overshadowed the shining table-cloth, at supper the food
choked him. But _Seder_ was over and yet no sign of the missing guest;
no word of explanation. In poignant anxiety, the old man walked the
three miles that lay between him and tidings of the beloved son. At his
chambers he learned that their occupant had not been in all day. Another
thing he learned there, too; for the _Mezuzah_ which he had fixed up on
the door-post when his boy moved in had been taken down, and it filled
his mind with a dread suspicion that Levi had not been eating at the
_kosher_ restaurant in Hatton Garden, as he had faithfully vowed to do.
But even this terrible thought was swallowed up in the fear that some
accident had happened to him. He haunted the house for an hour, filling
up the intervals of fruitless inquiry with little random walks round the
neighborhood, determined not to return home to his wife without news of
their child. The restless life of the great twinkling streets was almost
a novelty to him; it was rarely his perambulations in London extended
outside the Ghetto, and the radius of his life was proportionately
narrow,--with the intensity that narrowness forces on a big soul. The
streets dazzled him, he looked blinkingly hither and thither in the
despairing hope of finding his boy. His lips moved in silent prayer; he
raised his eyes beseechingly to the cold glittering heavens. Then, all
at once--as the clocks pointed to midnight--he found him. Found him
coming out of an unclean place, where he had violated the Passover.
Found him--fit climax of horror--with the "strange woman" of _The
Proverbs_, for whom the faithful Jew has a hereditary hatred.

His son--his. Reb Shemuel's! He, the servant of the Most High, the
teacher of the Faith to reverential thousands, had brought a son into
the world to profane the Name! Verily his gray hairs would go down with
sorrow to a speedy grave! And the sin was half his own; he had weakly
abandoned his boy in the midst of a great city. For one awful instant,
that seemed an eternity, the old man and the young faced each other
across the chasm which divided their lives. To the son the shock was
scarcely less violent than to the father. The _Seder_, which the day's
unwonted excitement had clean swept out of his mind, recurred to him in
a flash, and by the light of it h