lly under his arm. Bella
Weinberg was waiting at the steps.

"Did you?" she asked eagerly.

"Of course not," replied Fanny disdainfully. "Do you think I'd eat old
breakfast when I said I was going to fast all day?" Then, with sudden
suspicion, "Did you?"

"No!" stoutly.

And they entered, and took their seats. It was fascinating to watch the
other members of the congregation come in, the women rustling, the men
subdued in the unaccustomed dignity of black on a week day. One glance
at the yellow pews was like reading a complete social and financial
register. The seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de
Gotha of Congregation Emanu-el. Old Ben Reitman, patriarch among the
Jewish settlers of Winnebago, who had come over an immigrant youth, and
who now owned hundreds of rich farm acres, besides houses, mills and
banks, kinged it from the front seat of the center section. He was a
magnificent old man, with a ruddy face, and a fine head with a shock of
heavy iron-gray hair, keen eyes, undimmed by years, and a startling and
unexpected dimple in one cheek that gave him a mischievous and boyish
look.

Behind this dignitary sat his sons, and their wives, and his daughters
and their husbands, and their children, and so on, back to the Brandeis
pew, third from the last, behind which sat only a few obscure families
branded as Russians, as only the German-born Jew can brand those whose
misfortune it is to be born in that region known as hinter-Berlin.

The morning flew by, with its music, its responses, its sermon in
German, full of four- and five-syllable German words like Barmherzigkeit
and Eigentumlichkeit. All during the sermon Fanny sat and dreamed and
watched the shadow on the window of the pine tree that stood close to
the temple, and was vastly amused at the jaundiced look that the square
of yellow window glass cast upon the face of the vain and overdressed
Mrs. Nathan Pereles. From time to time Bella would turn to bestow upon
her a look intended to convey intense suffering and a resolute though
dying condition. Fanny stonily ignored these mute messages. They
offended something in her, though she could not tell what.

At the noon intermission she did not go home to the tempting dinner
smells, but wandered off through the little city park and down to the
river, where she sat on the bank and felt very virtuous, and spiritual,
and hollow. She was back in her seat when the afternoon service was
begun. Some of