the clan and the clothes-brush.  Everybody was home for Yomtov.  Malka’s husband, Michael, and Milly’s husband, Ephraim, were sitting at the table smoking big cigars and playing Loo with Sam Levine and David Brandon, who had been seduced into making a fourth.  The two young husbands had but that day returned from the country, for you cannot get unleavened bread at commercial hotels, and David in spite of a stormy crossing had arrived from Germany an hour earlier than he had expected, and not knowing what to do with himself had been surveying the humors of the Festival Fair till Sam met him and dragged him round to Zachariah Square.  It was too late to call that night on Hannah to be introduced to her parents, especially as he had wired he would come the next day.  There was no chance of Hannah being at the club, it was too busy a night for all angels of the hearth; even to-morrow, the even of the Festival, would be an awkward time for a young man to thrust his love-affairs upon a household given over to the more important matters of dietary preparation.  Still David could not consent to live another whole day without seeing the light of his eyes.

Leah, inwardly projecting an orgie of comic operas and dances, was assisting Milly in the kitchen.  Both young women were covered with flour and oil and grease, and their coarse handsome faces were flushed, for they had been busy all day drawing fowls, stewing prunes and pippins, gutting fish, melting fat, changing the crockery and doing the thousand and one things necessitated by gratitude for the discomfiture of Pharaoh at the Red Sea; Ezekiel slumbered upstairs in his crib.

“Mother,” said Michael, pulling pensively at his whisker as he looked at his card.  “This is Mr. Brandon, a friend of Sam’s.  Don’t get up, Brandon, we don’t make ceremonies here.  Turn up yours—­ah, the nine of trumps.”

“Lucky men!” said Malka with festival flippancy.  “While I must hurry off my supper so as to buy the fish, and Milly and Leah must sweat in the kitchen, you can squat yourselves down and play cards.”

“Yes,” laughed Sam, looking up and adding in Hebrew, “Blessed art thou, O Lord, who hath not made me a woman.”

“Now, now,” said David, putting his hand jocosely across the young man’s mouth.  “No more Hebrew.  Remember what happened last time.  Perhaps there’s some mysterious significance even in that, and you’ll find yourself let in for something before you know where you are.”

“You’re not going to prevent me talking the language of my Fathers,” gurgled Sam, bursting into a merry operatic whistle when the pressure was removed.

“Milly!  Leah!” cried Malka.  “Come and look at my fish!  Such a Metsiah!  See, they’re alive yet.”

“They are beauties, mother,” said Leah, entering with her sleeves half tucked up, showing the finely-moulded white arms in curious juxtaposition with the coarse red hands.

“O, mother, they’re alive!” said Milly, peering over her younger sister’s shoulder.