he letter to the end, she merely remarked:
"Father, this concerns me, and nobody else."

And so the matter dropped.

Not until the wedding-day, half an hour before the ceremony, when the
marriage canopy had already been erected in the courtyard, did
the farmer sum up courage to revert to the warning of the unknown
letter-writer. Taking his future son-in-law aside, he said:

"Ascher, is it true that you gamble?"

"Father," Ascher answered with equal firmness, "Gudule's eyes will save
me!" Ascher had uttered no untruth when he gave his father-in-law this
assurance. He spoke in all earnestness, for like every one else he knew
the magnetic power of Gudule's eyes.

Nowhere, probably, does the grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim
more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are
slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home
haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the
threshold when the _first card game_ was played.

It was with almost feverish anxiety that the eyes of the Ghetto were
fixed upon the development of a character like Ascher's; they followed
his every step with the closest attention. Long experience had taught
the Ghetto that no gambler could be trusted.

As though conscious that all eyes were upon him, Ascher showed himself
most punctilious in the discharge of even the minutest of communal
duties which devolved upon him as a denizen of the Ghetto, and his
habits of life were almost ostentatiously regular and decorous. His
business had prospered, and Gudule had borne him a son.

"Well, Gudule, my child," the farmer asked his daughter on the day when
his grandson was received into the covenant of Abraham,--"well, Gudule,
was the letter right?"

"What letter?" asked Gudule.

"That in which your husband was called a gambler."

"And can you still give a thought to such a letter?" was Gudule's
significant reply.

Three years later, Gudule's father came to visit her. This time she
showed him his second grandchild, her little Viola. He kissed the
children, and round little Viola's neck clasped three rows of pearls,
"that the child may know it had a grandfather once."

"And where are your pearls, Gudule?" he asked, "those left you by your
mother,--may she rest in peace! She always set such store by them."

"Those, father?" Gudule replied, turning pale; "oh, my husband has taken
them to a goldsmith in Prague. They require a new