a Boer bullet, and other curios, S. Cohn displayed them
in his window, and the crowd and the business they brought him put him
more and more in sympathy with Simon and the Empire. In conversation
he deprecated the non-militarism of the Jew: 'If I were only a
younger man myself, sir....'

The night Mafeking was relieved, the Emporium was decorated with
bunting from roof to basement, and a great illuminated window revealed
nothing but stacks of khaki trouserings.

So that, although the good man still sulked over Simon to his wife,
she was not deceived; and, the time drawing nigh for Simon's return,
she began to look happily forward to a truly reunited family.

In her wildest anxiety it never occurred to her that it was her
husband who would die. Yet this is what the irony of fate brought to
pass. In the unending campaign which death wages with life, S. Cohn
was slain, and Simon returned unscratched from the war to recite the
_Kaddish_ in his memory.

X

Simon came back bronzed and a man. The shock of finding his father
buried had supplied the last transforming touch; and, somewhat to his
mother's surprise, he settled down contentedly to the business he had
inherited. And now that he had practically unlimited money to spend,
he did not seem to be spending it, but to be keeping better hours than
when dodging his father's eye. His only absences from home he
accounted for as visits to Winstay, his pal of the campaign, with whom
he had got chummier than ever since the affair of the cattle-guard.
Winstay, he said, was of good English family, with an old house in
Harrow--fortunately on the London and North Western Railway, so that
he could easily get a breath of country air on Saturday and Sunday
afternoons. He seemed to have forgotten (although the Emporium was
still closed on Saturdays) that riding was forbidden, and his mother
did not remind him of it. The life that had been risked for the larger
cause, she vaguely felt as enfranchised from the limitations of the
smaller.

Nearly two months after Simon's return, a special military service was
held at the Great Synagogue on the feast of _Chanukah_--the
commemoration of the heroic days of Judas Maccabaeus--and the Jewish
C.I.V.'s were among the soldiers invited. Mrs. Cohn, too, got a ticket
for the imposing ceremony which was fixed for a Sunday afternoon.

As they sat at the midday meal on the exciting day, Mrs. Cohn said
suddenly: 'Guess who paid me a visit yesterd