“It was a villainous thing,” he went on.  “I’m glad I could help.  Er—­ is the silversmith all, right?”

“Money was paid,” answered the grey-haired Jew; “he is safe, therefore.  But he spent the night in chains, while his wife was here with you.”

He spoke with a pregnant gravity.  The Jewess started up and addressed him in a tongue Lucas could not understand.  He saw that she pointed to him and to the bedroom and to the stairs, and that she spoke with heat.  The old Jew heard her intently.

“So!” he said, in his deep voice.  “Then we have more to thank you for than we thought.  You gave up your rooms, it seems?”

“It is nothing,” said Lucas.  “You see, a lady—­well, I could hardly—­”

“Yes, I see,” agreed the old Jew.  “I have to do with a noble spirit.  And you do not want any thanks?  So?  But we Jews, we have more things to give than thanks, and better things.”

“I don’t want anything,” Lucas answered him.  “I’m glad everything’s all right.”

“You are very good,” said the old man, “very good and generous.  But some day, perhaps, you will have a need—­and then you will find that our people do not forget.”

The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child.  She bowed her head and murmured something as she passed out, and the baby laughed at him.

“Our people do not forget,” repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself forth.

“Well,” said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his room, “that’s finished, anyhow.”

It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to be for a few hours.  He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with vague and wordless regrets.  Then, upon the table, he saw the flute, and rose to put it in the cupboard.  It would never be useful again, but he did not want to throw it away.

The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little art—­or because of so little art—­had a way of straddling time like life itself.  “Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III,” the playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the acts.  The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time marked on him as clearly as on a clock.  With grey in his beard and patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous.  His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner of diffidence and incompetence.  His linen strives to be inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself in a wrong environment.  Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged.  It is a thing he has seen—­not a thing he has lived.