“Oh, then you would marry a Jewess!” said Hannah.

“Oh, of course,” he said in astonishment.  Then as he looked at her pretty, earnest face the amusing recollection that she was married already came over him with a sort of shock, not wholly comical.  There was a minute of silence, each pursuing a separate train of thought.  Then David wound up, as if there had been no break, with an elliptical, “wouldn’t you?”

Hannah shrugged her shoulders and elevated her eyebrows in a gesture that lacked her usual grace.

“Not if I had only to please myself,” she added.

“Oh, come!  Don’t say that,” he said anxiously.  “I don’t believe mixed marriages are a success.  Really, I don’t.  Besides, look at the scandal!”

Again she shrugged her shoulders, defiantly this time.

“I don’t suppose I shall ever get married,” she said.  “I never could marry a man father would approve of, so that a Christian would be no worse than an educated Jew.”

David did not quite grasp the sentence; he was trying to, when Sam and Leah passed them.  Sam winked in a friendly if not very refined manner.

“I see you two are getting on all right.” he said.

“Good gracious!” said Hannah, starting up with a blush.  “Everybody’s going back.  They will think us greedy.  What a pair of fools we are to have got into such serious conversation at a ball.”

“Was it serious?” said David with a retrospective air.  “Well, I never enjoyed a conversation so much in my life.”

“You mean the supper,” Hannah said lightly.

“Well, both.  It’s your fault that we don’t behave more appropriately.”

“How do you mean?”

“You won’t dance.”

“Do you want to?”

“Rather.”

“I thought you were afraid of all the swells.”

“Supper has given me courage.”

“Oh, very well if you want to, that’s to say if you really can waltz.”

“Try me, only you must allow for my being out of practice.  I didn’t get many dances at the Cape, I can tell you.”

“The Cape!” Hannah heard the words without making her usual grimace.  She put her hand lightly on his shoulder, he encircled her waist with his arm and they surrendered themselves to the intoxication of the slow, voluptuous music.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SONS OF THE COVENANT.

The “Sons of the Covenant” sent no representatives to the club balls, wotting neither of waltzes nor of dress-coats, and preferring death to the embrace of a strange dancing woman.  They were the congregation of which Mr. Belcovitch was President and their synagogue was the ground floor of No. 1 Royal Street—­two large rooms knocked into one, and the rear partitioned off for the use of the bewigged, heavy-jawed women who might not sit with the men lest they should fascinate their thoughts away from things spiritual.  Its