And so Mendel and Beenah sailed away over the Atlantic.  Daniel accompanied them to Liverpool, but Miriam said she could not get a day’s holiday—­perhaps she remembered the rebuke Esther Ansell had drawn down on herself, and was chary of asking.

At the dock in the chill dawn, Mendel Hyams kissed his son Daniel on the forehead and said in a broken voice: 

“Good-bye.  God bless you.”  He dared not add and God bless your Bessie, my daughter-in-law to be; but the benediction was in his heart.

Daniel turned away heavy-hearted, but the old man touched him on the shoulder and said in a low tremulous voice: 

“Won’t you forgive me for putting you into the fancy goods?”

“Father!  What do you mean?” said Daniel choking.  “Surely you are not thinking of the wild words I spoke years and years ago.  I have long forgotten them.”

“Then you will remain a good Jew,” said Mendel, trembling all over, “even when we are far away?”

“With God’s help,” said Daniel.  And then Mendel turned to Beenah and kissed her, weeping, and the faces of the old couple were radiant behind their tears.

Daniel stood on the clamorous hustling wharf, watching the ship move slowly from her moorings towards the open river, and neither he nor any one in the world but the happy pair knew that Mendel and Beenah were on their honeymoon.

* * * * *

Mrs. Hyams died two years after her honeymoon, and old Hyams laid a lover’s kiss upon her sealed eyelids.  Then, being absolutely alone in the world, he sold off his scanty furniture, sent the balance of the debt with a sovereign of undemanded interest to Bear Belcovitch, and girded up his loins for the journey to Jerusalem, which had been the dream of his life.

But the dream of his life had better have remained a dream Mendel saw the hills of Palestine and the holy Jordan and Mount Moriah, the site of the Temple, and the tombs of Absalom and Melchitsedek, and the gate of Zion and the aqueduct built by Solomon, and all that he had longed to see from boyhood.  But somehow it was not his Jerusalem—­scarce more than his London Ghetto transplanted, only grown filthier and narrower and more ragged, with cripples for beggars and lepers in lieu of hawkers.  The magic of his dream-city was not here.  This was something prosaic, almost sordid.  It made his heart sink as he thought of the sacred splendors of the Zion he had imaged in his suffering soul.  The rainbows builded of his bitter tears did not span the firmament of this dingy Eastern city, set amid sterile hills.  Where were the roses and lilies, the cedars and the fountains?  Mount Moriah was here indeed, but it bore the Mosque of Omar, and the Temple of Jehovah was but one ruined wall.  The Shechinah, the Divine Glory, had faded into cold sunshine.  “Who shall go up into the Mount of Jehovah.”  Lo, the Moslem worshipper and the Christian tourist.