Yvonne Rupert" cigar?'

'Yes.' He had divined the court's complacent misinterpretation ere he
saw its smile; the facile theory that brooding so much over her
fascinating picture had unhinged his brain. From that moment a
hardness came over his heart. He shut his lips grimly. What was the
use of talking? Whatever he said would be discredited on this impish
theory. And, even without it, how incredible his story, how irrelevant
to the charge of assaulting the doorkeeper!

'I was drunk,' was all he would say. He was committed for trial, and,
having no one to bail him out, lingered in a common cell with other
reprobates till the van brought him to the Law Court, and he came up to
justice in an elevator under the rebuking folds of the Stars and
Stripes. A fortnight's more confinement was all that was meted out to
him, but he had already had time enough to reflect that he had given
Yvonne Rupert one of the best advertisements of her life. It would have
enhanced the prisoner's bitterness had he known, as the knowing world
outside knew, that he was a poor devil in Yvonne Rupert's pay, and that
New York was chuckling over the original and ingenious dodge by which
she had again asserted her sovereignty as an advertiser--delicious,
immense!

VI

Short as his term of imprisonment was it coincided, much to his own
surprise, with the Jewish Penitential period, and the Day of Atonement
came in the middle. A wealthy Jewish philanthropist had organized a
prison prayer-service, and Elkan eagerly grasped at the break in the
monotony. Several of the prisoners who posed as Jews with this same
motive were detected and reprimanded; but Elkan felt, with the new
grim sense of humour that meditation on Yvonne Rupert and the world
she fooled was developing in him, that he was as little of a Jew as
any of them. This elopement to America had meant a violent break with
his whole religious past. Not once had he seen the inside of an
American synagogue. Gittel had had no use for synagogues.

He entered the improvised prayer-room with this ironic sense of coming
back to Judaism by the Christian prison door. But the service shook
him terribly. He forgot even to be amused by the one successful
impostor who had landed himself in an unforeseen deprivation of
rations during the whole fast day. The passionate outcries of the
old-fashioned _Chazan_, the solemn peals and tremolo notes of the
cornet, which had once been merely aesthetic effects to the re