-in-law for the maintenance of herself and her two
children, Becky and Joseph. On the contrary, she doubled her position
in the social scale by taking a four-roomed house in the Holloway
Road. Its proximity to the Clothing Emporium enabled Henry to come
home for lunch. But, alas! Fanny was not allowed many years of
enjoyment of these grandeurs and comforts. The one-roomed grave took
her, leaving the four-roomed house incredibly large and empty. Even
Natalya's Ghetto garret, which Fanny had not shared for seven years,
seemed cold and vacant to the poor mother. A new loneliness fell upon
her, not mitigated by ever rarer visits to her grandchildren. Devoid
of the link of her daughter, the house seemed immeasurably aloof from
her in the social scale. Henry was frigid and the little ones went
with marked reluctance to this stern, forbidding old woman who
questioned them as to their prayers and smelt of red-herrings. She
ceased to go to the house.

And then at last all her smouldering distrust of Henry Elkman found
overwhelming justification.

Before the year of mourning was up, before he was entitled to cease
saying the _Kaddish_ (funeral hymn) for her darling Fanny, the wretch,
she heard, was married again. And married--villainy upon villainy,
horror upon horror--to a Christian girl, a heathen abomination.
Natalya was wrestling with her over-full sack when she got the news
from a gossiping lady client, and she was boring holes for the passage
of string to tie up its mouth. She turned the knife viciously, as if
it were in Henry Elkman's heart.

She did not know the details of the piquant, tender courtship between
him and the pretty assistant at the great drapery store that
neighboured the Holloway Clothing Emporium, any more than she
understood the gradual process which had sapped Henry's instinct of
racial isolation, or how he had passed from admiration of British ways
into entire abandonment of Jewish. She was spared, too, the knowledge
that latterly her own Fanny had slid with him into the facile paths of
impiety; that they had ridden for a breath of country air on Sabbath
afternoons. They had been considerate enough to hide that from her. To
the old clo'-woman's crude mind, Henry Elkman existed as a monster of
ready-made wickedness, and she believed even that he had been married
in church and baptized, despite that her informant tried to console
her with the assurance that the knot had been tied in a Registrar's
offi