sudden
movement, he slipped from her embrace, and, when she raised her eyes,
she saw Meir again leaving the gate of the house.

"Meir!" exclaimed the girl, in surprise, "where are you going? Are
you not going to have supper with us?"

The departing young man did not answer the girl's voice calling him
to the family table. A deep wrinkle angrily cut his forehead. Now he
understood the nothingness of his exclamation in the presence of his
grandfather: "I am no one's slave!" They disposed, without the
slightest regard for his will, of his future, of his family, and he
knew that the commands of the elders must be obeyed.

No! He shuddered to think that it must be so. Why? He did not know
the young girl Mera, who, somewhere in the world, was studying the
same things which he himself desired so much. But, walking through
the town and the empty fields separating it from the Karaim's Hill,
walking slowly, with hands behind him, and bent head, he thought
obstinately, almost mechanically, and incessantly, "I am no one's
slave!" Pride and the desire for freedom boiled in his heart, aroused
by some unknown source, probably those secret breaths of nature sown
in the fields by noble and strong spirits thirsting for liberty,
righteousness, and knowledge.

At the foot of the Karaim's Hill, in the hut which clung closely to
its sandy side, there burned a small, yellow light. Over it, through
the forked branches of the willow tree, shone many small stars, and
further on, over the great fields, lay the gray shadows of the dusk.

In the interior of the hut, against the low wall, was seated an old
man, working with the flexible willow branches. His figure was gray
in the dusk of the hut, and the features of the bent face could not
be seen. The tall, straight figure of a girl, with a thin face, sat
in a wooden chair near the flame of the candle. In one dropped hand
a spindle was softly twirling, and over her head was a board with a
big bunch of wool fastened to it. From the wall, where the old man
sat, came a hoarse, trembling voice:

"In the midst of the desert, so large that one could not see its end,
rose two mountains so high that their summits were hidden in the
clouds. The names of these mountains were Horeb and Sinai."

The voice became silent, and the girl, who listened gravely while she
spun, said:

"Zeide, speak further."

But at that moment a manly voice was heard at the open window.

"Golda!"

The spinner was neit