Here, lost in a sweet melancholy, Esther dreamed away the long gray day, only vaguely conscious of the stages of the service—­morning dovetailing into afternoon service, and afternoon into evening; of the heavy-jowled woman behind her reciting a jargon-version of the Atonement liturgy to a devout coterie; of the prostrations full-length on the floor, and the series of impassioned sermons; of the interminably rhyming poems, and the acrostics with their recurring burdens shouted in devotional frenzy, voice rising above voice as in emulation, with special staccato phrases flung heavenwards; of the wailing confessions of communal sin, with their accompaniment of sobs and tears and howls and grimaces and clenchings of palms and beatings of the breast.  She was lapped in a great ocean of sound that broke upon her consciousness like the waves upon a beach, now with a cooing murmur, now with a majestic crash, followed by a long receding moan.  She lost herself in the roar, in its barren sensuousness, while the leaden sky grew duskier and the twilight crept on, and the awful hour drew nigh when God would seal what He had written, and the annual scrolls of destiny would be closed, immutable.  She saw them looming mystically through the skylight, the swaying forms below, in their white grave-clothes, oscillating weirdly backwards and forwards, bowed as by a mighty wind.

Suddenly there fell a vast silence; even from without no sound came to break the awful stillness.  It was as if all creation paused to hear a pregnant word.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!” sang the cantor frenziedly.

And all the ghostly congregation answered with a great cry, closing their eyes and rocking frantically to and fro: 

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”

They seemed like a great army of the sheeted dead risen to testify to the Unity.  The magnetic tremor that ran through the synagogue thrilled the lonely girl to the core; once again her dead self woke, her dead ancestors that would not be shaken off lived and moved in her.  She was sucked up into the great wave of passionate faith, and from her lips came, in rapturous surrender to an overmastering impulse, the half-hysterical protestation: 

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”

And then in the brief instant while the congregation, with ever-ascending rhapsody, blessed God till the climax came with the sevenfold declaration, “the Lord, He is God,” the whole history of her strange, unhappy race flashed through her mind in a whirl of resistless emotion.  She was overwhelmed by the thought of its sons in every corner of the earth proclaiming to the sombre twilight sky the belief for which its generations had lived and died—­the Jews of Russia sobbing it forth in their pale of enclosure, the Jews of Morocco in their mellah, and of South Africa in their tents by the diamond mines:  the Jews of the New World in great free cities, in