putable
master-cutter, were now surcharged with doom and chastisement. The
very sight of the Hebrew books and scrolls touched a thousand memories
of home and innocence.

Ah, God, how he had sinned!

'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!' he cried, smiting
his breast and rocking to and fro.

His poor deserted wife and children! How terrible for Haigitcha to
wake up one morning and find him gone! As terrible as for him to wake
up one morning and find Gittel gone. Ah, God had indeed paid him in
kind! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

The philanthropist himself preached the sermon. God could never
forgive sins till the sinner had first straightened out the human
wrongs.

Ah, true, true! If he could only find his family again. If he could
try by love and immeasurable devotion to atone for the past. Then
again life would have a meaning and an aim. Poor, poor Haigitcha! How
he would weep over her and cherish her. And his children! They must be
grown up. Yankely must be quite a young man. Yes, he would be
seventeen by now. And Rachel, that pretty, clinging cherub!

In all those years he had not dared to let his thoughts pause upon
them. His past lay like a misty dream behind those thousand leagues of
ocean. But now it started up in all the colours of daylight, warm,
appealing. Yes, he would go back to his dear ones who must still crave
his love and guidance; he would plead and be forgiven, and end his
days piously at the sacred hearth of duty.

'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!'

If only he could get back to old England.

He appealed to the philanthropist, and lied amid all his contrition.
It was desperation at the severance from his wife and children that
had driven him to drink, lust of gold that had spurred him across the
Atlantic. Now a wiser and sadder man, he would be content with a
modicum and the wife of his bosom.

VII

He arrived at last, with a few charity coins in his pocket, in the
familiar Spitalfields alley, guarded by the three iron posts over
which he remembered his Yankely leaping. His heart was full of tears
and memories. Ah, there was the butcher's shop still underneath the
old apartment, with the tin labels stuck in the _kosher_ meat, and
there was Gideon, the fat, genial butcher, flourishing his great
carving-knife as of yore, though without that ancient smile of
brotherly recognition. Gideon's frigidity chilled him; it was an
inauspicious omen, a symptom of thing