“What an idea!” murmured Esther, blushing beneath her spotted veil.

“Well, you’re very young,” said Hannah, glancing down at the smaller figure with a sweet matronly smile.

“I shall never marry,” Esther said in low tones.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Esther!  There’s no happiness for a woman without it.  You needn’t talk like Miriam Hyams—­at least not yet.  Oh yes, I know what you’re thinking—­”

“No, I’m not,” faintly protested Esther

“Yes, you are,” said Hannah, smiling at the paradoxical denial.  “But who’d have me?  Ah, here are the Greeners!” and her smile softened to angelic tenderness.

It was a frowzy, unsightly group that sat on the pavement, surrounded by a semi-sympathetic crowd—­the father in a long grimy coat, the mother covered, as to her head, with a shawl, which also contained the baby.  But the elders were naively childish and the children uncannily elderly; and something in Esther’s breast seemed to stir with a strange sense of kinship.  The race instinct awoke to consciousness of itself.  Dulled by contact with cultured Jews, transformed almost to repulsion by the spectacle of the coarsely prosperous, it leaped into life at the appeal of squalor and misery.  In the morning the Ghetto had simply chilled her; her heart had turned to it as to a haven, and the reality was dismal.  Now that the first ugliness had worn off, she felt her heart warming.  Her eyes moistened.  She thrilled from head to foot with the sense of a mission—­of a niche in the temple of human service which she had been predestined to fill.  Who could comprehend as she these stunted souls, limited in all save suffering?  Happiness was not for her; but service remained.  Penetrated by the new emotion, she seemed to herself to have found the key to Hannah’s holy calm.

With the money now in hand, the two girls sought a lodging for the poor waifs.  Esther suddenly remembered the empty back garret in No. 1 Royal Street, and here, after due negotiations with the pickled-herring dealer next door, the family was installed.  Esther’s emotions at the sight of the old place were poignant; happily the bustle of installation, of laying down a couple of mattresses, of borrowing Dutch Debby’s tea-things, and of getting ready a meal, allayed their intensity.  That little figure with the masculine boots showed itself but by fits and flashes.  But the strangeness of the episode formed the undercurrent of all her thoughts; it seemed to carry to a climax the irony of her initial gift to Hannah.

Escaping from the blessings of the Greeners, she accompanied her new friend to Reb Shemuel’s.  She was shocked to see the change in the venerable old man; he looked quite broken up.  But he was chivalrous as of yore:  the vein of quiet humor was still there, though his voice was charged with gentle melancholy.  The Rebbitzin’s nose had grown sharper than ever; her soul seemed to have