houses in the Kleinseite, and
that thus, in a roundabout way, a demand had been made for them. "Of
course, they will not give them up," he had said to his father. "Why
should they, unless the law makes them? They have no idea of honour or
honesty to one of us." The elder Jew had then expressed his opinion
that Josef Balatka should be required to make the demand as a matter of
business, to enforce a legal right; but to this Anton had replied that
the old man in the Kleinseite was not in a condition to act efficiently
in the matter himself. It was to him that the money had been advanced,
but to the Zamenoys that it had in truth been paid; and Anton declared
his purpose of going to Karil Zamenoy and himself making his demand.
And then there had been a discussion, almost amounting to a quarrel,
between the two Trendellsohns as to Nina Balatka. Poor Nina need not
have added another to her many causes of suffering by doubting her
lover's truth. Anton Trendellsohn, though not given to speak of his
love with that demonstrative vehemence to which Nina had trusted in her
attempts to make her friends understand that she could not be talked
out of her engagement, was nevertheless sufficiently firm in his
purpose. He was a man very constant in all his purposes, whom none
who knew him would have supposed likely to jeopardise his worldly
interests for the love of a Christian girl, but who was very little
apt to abandon aught to which he had set his hand because the voices
of those around him might be against him. He had thought much of his
position as a Jew before he had spoken of love to the penniless
Christian maiden who frequented his father's house, pleading for her
father in his poverty; but the words when spoken meant much, and Nina
need not have feared that he would forget them. He was a man not much
given to dalliance, not requiring from day to day the soft sweetness of
a woman's presence to keep his love warm; but his love could maintain
its own heat, without any softness or dalliance. Had it not been so,
such a girl as Nina would hardly have surrendered to him her whole
heart as she had done.

"You will fall into trouble about the maiden," the elder Trendellsohn
had said.

"True, father; there will be trouble enough. In what that we do is
there not trouble?"

"A man in the business of his life must encounter labour and grief and
disappointment. He should take to him a wife to give him ease in these
things, not one who wi