“This man—­tell me, my daughter, thou lovest him still?”

She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of reckless despair.

“What does it matter?  My life is but a shadow.”

The Reb took her to his breast, though she remained stony to his touch, and laid his wet face against her burning cheeks.

“My child, my poor Hannah; I thought God had sent thee peace ten years ago; that He had rewarded thee for thy obedience to His Law.”

She drew her face away from his.

“It was not His Law; it was a miserable juggling with texts.  Thou alone interpretedst God’s law thus.  No one knew of the matter.”

He could not argue; the breast against which he held her was shaken by a tempest of grief, which swept away all save human remorse, human love.

“My daughter,” he sobbed, “I have ruined thy life!” After an agonized pause, he said:  “Tell me, Hannah, is there nothing I can do to make atonement to thee?”

“Only one thing, father,” she articulated chokingly; “forgive Levi.”

There was a moment of solemn silence.  Then the Reb spake.

“Tell thy mother to put on her things and take what she needs for the journey.  Perchance we may be away for days.”

They mingled their tears in sweet reconciliation.  Presently, the Reb said: 

“Go now to thy mother, and see also that the boy’s room be made ready as of old.  Perchance God will hear my prayer, and he will yet be restored to us.”

A new peace fell upon Hannah’s soul.  “My sacrifice was not in vain after all,” she thought, with a throb of happiness that was almost exultation.

But Levi never came back.  The news of his death arrived on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in a letter to Esther who had been left in charge of the house.

“He died quietly at the end,” Hannah wrote, “happy in the consciousness of father’s forgiveness, and leaning trustfully upon his interposition with Heaven; but he had delirious moments, during which he raved painfully.  The poor boy was in great fear of death, moaning prayers that he might be spared till after Yom Kippur, when he would be cleansed of sin, and babbling about serpents that would twine themselves round his arm and brow, like the phylacteries he had not worn.  He made father repeat his ‘Verse’ to him over and over again, so that he might remember his name when the angel of the grave asked it; and borrowed father’s phylacteries, the headpiece of which was much too large for him with his shaven crown.  When he had them on, and the Talith round him, he grew easier, and began murmuring the death-bed prayers with father.  One of them runs:  ’O may my death be an atonement for all the sins, iniquities and transgressions of which I have been guilty against Thee!’ I trust it may be so indeed.  It seems so hard for a young man full of life and high spirits to be cut down, while the wretched are left