to arrive
just for the wedding--like a fairy godmother." She smiled wistfully.

"Then you will live with your people, I suppose?"

"I suppose so. I dare say I shall become quite good again. Ah, your new
Judaisms will never appeal like the old, with all its imperfections.
They will never keep the race together through shine and shade as that
did. They do but stave off the inevitable dissolution. It is
beautiful--that old childlike faith in the pillar of cloud by day and
the pillar of fire by night, that patient waiting through the centuries
for the Messiah who even to you, I dare say, is a mere symbol." Again
the wistful look lit up her eyes. "That's what you rich people will
never understand--it doesn't seem to go with dinners in seven courses,
somehow."

"Oh, but I do understand," he protested. "It's what I told Strelitski,
who is all for intellect in religion. He is going to America, too," he
said, with a sudden pang of jealous apprehension.

"On a holiday?"

"No; he is going to resign his ministry here."

"What! Has he got a better offer from America?"

"Still so cruel to him," he said reprovingly. "He is resigning for
conscience' sake."

"After all these years?" she queried sarcastically.

"Miss Ansell, you wrong him! He was not happy in his position. You were
right so far. But he cannot endure his shackles any longer. And it is
you who have inspired him to break them."

"I?" she exclaimed, startled.

"Yes, I told him why you had left Mrs. Henry Goldsmith's--it seemed to
act like an electrical stimulus. Then and there he made me write a
paragraph announcing his resignation. It will appear to-morrow."

Esther's eyes filled with soft light. She walked on in silence; then,
noticing she had automatically walked too much in the direction of her
place of concealment, she came to an abrupt stop.

"We must part here," she said. "If I ever come across my old shepherd in
America, I will be nicer to him. It is really quite heroic of him--you
must have exaggerated my own petty sacrifice alarmingly if it really
supplied him with inspiration. What is he going to do in America?"

"To preach a universal Judaism. He is a born idealist; his ideas have
always such a magnificent sweep. Years ago he wanted all the Jews to
return to Palestine."

Esther smiled faintly, not at Strelitski, but at Raphael's calling
another man an idealist. She had never yet done justice to the strain of
common-sense that saved him from bei