pon both, and directing the
artist's attention in particular to the pictures that hung around the
stately dining-room. There was a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a Landseer.
He drew Barstein round the walls.

'I am very fond of the English school,' he said. His cap was back in
his coat-tail, and he had become again the bluff and burly Briton.

'You don't patronize the Italians at all?' asked the artist.

'No,' said Sir Asher. He lowered his voice. 'Between you and I,' said
he--it was his main fault of grammar--'in Italian art one is never
safe from the Madonna, not to mention her Son.' It was a fresh
reminder of the Palestinian patriarch. Sir Asher never discussed
theology except with those who agreed with him. Nor did he ever,
whether in private or in public, breathe an unfriendly word against
his Christian fellow-citizens. All were sons of the same Father, as he
would frequently say from the platform. But in his heart of hearts he
cherished a contempt, softened by stupefaction, for the arithmetical
incapacity of Trinitarians.

Christianity under any other aspect did not exist for him. It was a
blunder impossible to a race with a genius for calculation. 'How can
three be one?' he would demand witheringly of his cronies. The
question was in his eye now as he summed up Italian art to the
sculptor, and a faint smile twitching about his lips invited his
fellow-Jew to share with him his feeling of spiritual and intellectual
superiority to the poor blind Christians at his table, as well as to
Christendom generally.

But the artist refused to come up on the pedestal. 'Surely the Madonna
was a very beautiful conception,' he said.

Sir Asher looked startled. 'Ah yes, you are an artist,' he remembered.
'You think only of the beautiful outside. But how can there be
three-in-one or one-in-three?'

Barstein did not reply, and Sir Asher added in a low scornful tone:
'Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.'

III

A sudden commission recalled Barstein to town before he could even pay
his after-dinner call. But the seed sown in his soul that evening was
not to be stifled. This seed was nothing less than the idea of a
national revival of his people. He hunted up his old prayer-books, and
made many discoveries as his modern consciousness depolarized page
upon page that had never in boyhood been anything to him but a series
of syllables to be gabbled off as rapidly as possible, when their
meaning was not sti