grass. Oh, why had she deserted them? What were they
doing now, without her mother-care, out and away beyond the great seas?
For weeks together, the thought of them had not once crossed her mind;
to-night she stretched her arms involuntarily towards her loved ones,
not towards the shadowy figures of reality, scarcely less phantasmal
than the dead Benjamin, but towards the childish figures of the past.
What happy times they had had together in the dear old garret!

In her strange half-waking hallucination, her outstretched arms were
clasped round little Sarah. She was putting her to bed and the tiny
thing was repeating after her, in broken Hebrew, the children's
night-prayer: "Suffer me to lie down in peace, and let me rise up in
peace. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," with its
unauthorized appendix in baby English: "Dod teep me, and mate me a dood
dirl, orways."

She woke to full consciousness with a start; her arms chilled, her face
wet. But the problem was solved.

She would go back to them, back to her true home, where loving faces
waited to welcome her, where hearts were open and life was simple and
the weary brain could find rest from the stress and struggle of
obstinate questionings of destiny. Life was so simple at bottom; it was
she that was so perversely complex. She would go back to her father
whose naive devout face swam glorified upon a sea of tears; yea, and
back to her father's primitive faith like a tired lost child that spies
its home at last. The quaint, monotonous cadence of her father's prayers
rang pathetically in her ears; and a great light, the light that Raphael
had shown her, seemed to blend mystically with the once meaningless
sounds. Yea, all things were from Him who created light and darkness,
good and evil; she felt her cares falling from her, her soul absorbing
itself in the sense of a Divine Love, awful, profound, immeasurable,
underlying and transcending all things, incomprehensibly satisfying the
soul and justifying and explaining the universe. The infinite fret and
fume of life seemed like the petulance of an infant in the presence of
this restful tenderness diffused through the great spaces. How holy the
stars seemed up there in the quiet sky, like so many Sabbath lights
shedding visible consecration and blessing!

Yes, she would go back to her loved ones, back from this dainty room,
with its white laces and perfumed draperies, back if need be to a Ghetto
garret.