made visible.  Even that very afternoon’s scene with Raphael was part of the “old unhappy far-off things” that could only live henceforwards in fantastic arcades of glowing coal, out of all relation to future realities.  Her new-born love for Raphael appeared as ancient and as arid as the girlish ambitions that had seemed on the point of blossoming when she was transplanted from the Ghetto.  That, too, was in the flames, and should remain there.

At last she started up with a confused sense of wasted time and began to undress mechanically, trying to concentrate her thoughts the while on the problem that faced her.  But they wandered back to her first night in the fine house, when a separate bedroom was a new experience and she was afraid to sleep alone, though turned fifteen.  But she was more afraid of appearing a great baby, and so no one in the world ever knew what the imaginative little creature had lived down.

In the middle of brushing her hair she ran to the door and locked it, from a sudden dread that she might oversleep herself and some one would come in and see the letter on the writing-desk.  She had not solved the problem even by the time she got into bed; the fire opposite the foot was burning down, but there was a red glow penetrating the dimness.  She had forgotten to draw the blind, and she saw the clear stars shining peacefully in the sky.  She looked and looked at them and they led her thoughts away from the problem once more.  She seemed to be lying in Victoria Park, looking up with innocent mystic rapture and restfulness at the brooding blue sky.  The blood-and-thunder boys’ story she had borrowed from Solomon had fallen from her hand and lay unheeded on the grass.  Solomon was tossing a ball to Rachel, which he had acquired by a colossal accumulation of buttons, and Isaac and Sarah were rolling and wrangling on the grass.  Oh, why had she deserted them?  What were they doing now, without her mother-care, out and away beyond the great seas?  For weeks together, the thought of them had not once crossed her mind; to-night she stretched her arms involuntarily towards her loved ones, not towards the shadowy figures of reality, scarcely less phantasmal than the dead Benjamin, but towards the childish figures of the past.  What happy times they had had together in the dear old garret!

In her strange half-waking hallucination, her outstretched arms were clasped round little Sarah.  She was putting her to bed and the tiny thing was repeating after her, in broken Hebrew, the children’s night-prayer:  “Suffer me to lie down in peace, and let me rise up in peace.  Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” with its unauthorized appendix in baby English:  “Dod teep me, and mate me a dood dirl, orways.”

She woke to full consciousness with a start; her arms chilled, her face wet.  But the problem was solved.