a red fur-lined cloak, for the air was keen.  She was a majestic being with a florid complexion not entirely artificial, big blue eyes and teeth of that whiteness which is the practical equivalent of a sense of humor in evoking the possessor’s smiles.  They drove to a restaurant a few hundred yards distant, for Miss Wynne detested using her feet except to dance with.  It was a fashionable restaurant, where the prices obligingly rose after ten, to accommodate the purses of the supper-clientele.  Miss Wynne always drank champagne, except when alone, and in politeness Leonard had to imbibe more of this frothy compound.  He knew he would have to pay for the day’s extravagance by a week of comparative abstemiousness, but recklessness generally meant magnificence with him.  They occupied a cosy little corner behind a screen, and Miss Wynne bubbled over with laughter like an animated champagne bottle.  One or two of his acquaintances espied him and winked genially, and Leonard had the satisfaction of feeling that he was not dissipating his money without purchasing enhanced reputation.  He had not felt in gayer spirits for months than when, with Gladys Wynne on his arm and a cigarette in his mouth, he sauntered out of the brilliantly-lit restaurant into the feverish dusk of the midnight street, shot with points of fire.

“Hansom, sir!”

“Levi!”

A great cry of anguish rent the air—­Leonard’s cheeks burned.  Involuntarily he looked round.  Then his heart stood still.  There, a few yards from him, rooted to the pavement, with stony staring face, was Reb Shemuel.  The old man wore an unbrushed high hat and an uncouth unbuttoned overcoat.  His hair and beard were quite white now, and the strong countenance lined with countless wrinkles was distorted with pain and astonishment.  He looked a cross between an ancient prophet and a shabby street lunatic.  The unprecedented absence of the son from the Seder ceremonial had filled the Reb’s household with the gravest alarm.  Nothing short of death or mortal sickness could be keeping the boy away.  It was long before the Reb could bring himself to commence the Hagadah without his son to ask the time-honored opening question; and when he did he paused every minute to listen to footsteps or the voice of the wind without.  The joyous holiness of the Festival was troubled, a black cloud overshadowed the shining table-cloth, at supper the food choked him.  But Seder was over and yet no sign of the missing guest; no word of explanation.  In poignant anxiety, the old man walked the three miles that lay between him and tidings of the beloved son.  At his chambers he learned that their occupant had not been in all day.  Another thing he learned there, too; for the Mezuzah which he had fixed up on the door-post when his boy moved in had been taken down, and it filled his mind with a dread suspicion that Levi had not been eating at the kosher restaurant in Hatton Garden,