“You are wrong, my child, if you think God does not care for you because He allows you to suffer.  Are you rich?  Are you prosperous?  Have you every earthly blessing?  Then beware, for Satan is watching for your soul.  But are you poor?  Are you going through unmerited trouble?  Have you lost some one who was dearer to you than your heart of hearts?  Then take courage, for our holy and blessed Saviour has marked you for His own.”

I know nothing of that priest except his whispering voice, which, coming through the grating of the confessional, produced the effect of the supernatural, but I thought then, and I think now, that he must have been a great as well as a good man.

I perfectly recollect that, when I left the church and passed into the streets, it seemed as if his spirit went with me and built up in my soul a resolution that was bright with heavenly tears and sunshine.

Work!  Work!  Work!  I should work still harder than before.  No matter how mean, ill-paid, and uncongenial my work might be, I should work all day and all night if necessary.  And since I had failed to get my child into an orphanage, it was clearly intended that I should keep her with me, for my own charge and care and joy.

This was the mood in which I returned to the house of the Jew.

It was Saturday morning, and though the broader thoroughfares of the East End were crowded and the narrower streets full of life, the Jew’s house was silent, for it was the Jewish Sabbath.

As I went hurriedly upstairs I heard the Jew himself, who was dressing for the synagogue, singing his Sabbath hymn:  Lerho daudee likras kollo—­“Come, O friend, let us go forth to meet the Bride, let us receive the Sabbath with joy!”

Then came a shock.

When I reached my room I found, to my dismay, that the pile of vests which I had left on my bed on going out the day before had been removed; and just as I was telling myself that no one else except Mrs. Abramovitch had a key to my door I heard shuffling footsteps on the stair, and knew that her husband was coming up to me.

A moment afterwards the Jew stood in my doorway.  He was dressed in his Sabbath suit and, free from the incongruous indications of his homely calling, the patriarchal appearance which had first struck me was even more marked than before.  His face was pale, his expression was severe, and if his tongue betrayed the broken English of the Polish Jew, I, in my confusion and fear, did not notice it then.

My first thought was that he had come to reprove me for neglecting my work, and I was prepared to promise to make up for my absence.  But at a second glance I saw that something had happened, something had become known, and that he was there to condemn and denounce me.

“You have been out all night,” he said.  “Can you tell me where you have been?”

I knew I could not, and though it flashed upon me to say that I had slept at the house of a friend, I saw that, if he asked who my friend was, and what, I should be speechless.