, shameful past began
to rise up from its desolate tomb.

He even lived through that prologue in the Ghetto garret, when, as
benevolent master-tailor receiving the highest class work from S.
Cohn's in the Holloway Road, he was called upstairs to assist the
penniless Polish immigrants.

There she sat, the witching she-devil, perched on the rickety table
just contributed to the home, a piquant, dark-eyed, yet golden-haired,
mite of eleven, calm and comparatively spruce amid the wailing litter
of parents and children.

'Settle this among yourselves,' she seemed to be saying. 'When the
chairs are here I will sit on _them_; when the table is laid I will
draw to; when the pious philanthropist provides the fire I will purr
on the hearth.'

Ah, _he_ had come forward as the pious philanthropist--pious enough
then, Heaven knew. Why had Satan thrown such lures in the way of the
reputable employer, the treasurer of 'The Gates of Mercy' Synagogue,
with children of his own, and the best wife in the world? Did he not
pray every day to be delivered from the _Satan Mekatrig_? Had he not
meant it for the best when he took her into his workshop? It was only
when, at the age of sixteen, Gittel Goldstein left the whirring
machine-room for the more lucrative and laurelled position of heroine
of Goldwater's London Yiddish Theatre that he had discovered how this
whimsical, coquettish creature had insinuated herself into his very
being.

Ah, madness, madness! that flight with her to America with all his
savings, that desertion of his wife and children! But what delicious
delirium that one year in New York, prodigal, reckless, ere, with the
disappearance of his funds, she, too, disappeared. And now, here he
was--after nigh seven apathetic years, in which the need of getting a
living was the only spur to living on--glad to take a woman's place
when female labour struck for five cents more a hundred. The old
bitter tears came up to his eyes, blurring the cheerless scene, the
shabby men and unlovely women with their red paste-pots, the medley of
bare and coloured boxes, the long shelf of twine-balls. And as he
wept, the vain salt drops moistened the pictures of Yvonne Rupert.

II

She became an obsession, this Franco-American singer and dancer, as he
sat pasting and pasting, caressing her pictured face with sticky
fingers. There were brief intervals of freedom from her image when he
was 'edging' and 'backing,' or when he was lining the