down his name 'Rozenoffski' like a bomb, and
the red of his cheeks changed to the pallor of apprehension. But no
explosion followed, save of enthusiasm. Evidently, the episode so
lurid to his own memory, had left no impress on hers.

'Oh, but America _must_ know you, Herr Rozenoffski. You must promise
me to come back in the fall, give me the glory of launching you.' And,
seeing the cloud on his face, she cried: 'You must, you must, you
must!' clapping her hands at each 'must.'

He hesitated, distracted between rapture and anxiety lest she should
remember.

'You have never heard of me, of course,' she persisted humbly; 'but
positively everybody has played at my house in Chicago.'

'_Ach so!_' he muttered. Had he perhaps misinterpreted and magnified
the attitude of these Americans? Was it possible that Mrs. Wilhammer
had really been too ill to see him? She looked frail and feverish
behind all her brilliant beauty. Or had she not even seen his letter?
had her secretary presumed to guard her from Semitic invaders? Or was
she deliberately choosing to forget and forgive his Jewishness? In any
case, best let sleeping dogs lie. He was being sought; it would be the
silliest of social blunders to recall that he had already been
rejected.

'It is years since Chicago had a real musical sensation,' pleaded the
temptress.

'I'm afraid my engagements will not permit me to return this autumn,'
he replied tactfully.

'Do you take sugar?' she retorted unexpectedly; then, as she handed
him his cup, she smiled archly into his eyes. 'You can't shake me off,
you know; I shall follow you about Europe--to all your concerts.'

When he left her--after inscribing his autograph, his permanent Munich
address, and the earliest possible date for his Chicago concert, in a
dainty diary brought in by her red-haired maid--his whole being was
swelling, expanding. He had burst the coils of this narrow tribalism
that had suddenly retwined itself round him; he had got back again
from the fusty conventicles and the sunless Ghettos--back to spacious
salons and radiant hostesses and the great free life of art. He drew
deep breaths of sea-air as he paced the deck, strewn so thickly with
pleasant passengers to whom he felt drawn in a renewed sense of the
human brotherhood. _Rishus_, forsooth!

SAMOOBORONA

SAMOOBORONA

I

Milovka was to be the next place reddened on the map of Holy Russia.
The news of the projected Jewish massacre