ak, gravely, and as
in a dream:

"Who knows? Who knows? Perhaps? Perhaps?" She did not conclude.

"Perhaps what?" asked Ginzburg, impatiently.

"Why should it come like this?" Dobe went on. "The same time, the same
sickness?"

"A simple blind coincidence of circumstances," replied her husband.

"But so exactly--one like the other, as if somebody had made it happen
on purpose."

Ginzburg understood his wife's meaning, and answered short and sharp:

"Dobe, don't talk nonsense."

Meanwhile Dvorehle's illness developed, and the day came on which the
doctor said that a crisis would occur within twenty-four hours. What
this meant to the Ginzburgs would be difficult to describe, but each of
them determined privately not to survive the loss of their second child.

They sat beside it, not lifting their eyes from its face. They were pale
and dazed with grief and sleepless nights, their hearts half-dead within
them, they shed no tears, they were so much more dead than alive
themselves, and the child's flame of life flickered and dwindled,
flickered and dwindled.

A tangle of memories was stirring in Ginzburg's head, all relating to
deaths and graves. He lived through the death of their first child with
all details--his father's death, his mother's--early in a summer
morning--that was--that was--he recalls it--as though it were to-day.

"What is to-day?" he wonders. "What day of the month is it?" And then he
remembers, it is the first of May.

"The same day," he murmurs, as if he were talking in his sleep.

"What the same day?" asks Dobe.

"Nothing," says Ginzburg. "I was thinking of something."

He went on thinking, and fell into a doze where he sat.

He saw his mother enter the room with a soft step, take a chair, and sit
down by the sick child.

"Mother, save it!" he begs her, his heart is full to bursting, and he
begins to cry.

"Isrolik," says his mother, "I have brought a remedy for the child that
bears my name."

"Mame!!!"

He is about to throw himself upon her neck and kiss her, but she motions
him lightly aside.

"Why do you never light a candle for my Yohrzeit?" she inquires, and
looks at him reproachfully.

"Mame, have pity on us, save the child!"

"The child will live, only you must light me a candle."

"Mame" (he sobs louder), "have pity!"

"Light my candle--make haste, make haste--"

"Ginzburg!" a shriek from his wife, and he awoke with a start.

"Ginzburg, the child is dying! Fly f