rom hunger, many of them, sat rapt and still
except at those times when the prayer book demanded spoken responses.
The voice of the little rabbi, rather weak now, had in it a timbre
that made it startlingly sweet and clear and resonant. Fanny slid very
quietly into the seat beside Mrs. Brandeis, and slipped her moist
and cold little hand into her mother's warm, work-roughened palm. The
mother's brown eyes, very bright with unshed tears, left their perusal
of the prayer book to dwell upon the white little face that was smiling
rather wanly up at her. The pages of the prayer book lay two-thirds or
more to the left. Just as Fanny remarked this, there was a little moment
of hush in the march of the day's long service. The memorial hour had
begun.

Little Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat. The congregation stirred a
bit, changed its cramped position. Bella, the guilty, came stealing in,
a pink-and-gold picture of angelic virtue. Fanny, looking at her, felt
very aloof, and clean, and remote.

Molly Brandeis seemed to sense what had happened.

"But you didn't, did you?" she whispered softly.

Fanny shook her head.

Rabbi Thalmann was seated in his great carved chair. His eyes were
closed. The wheezy little organ in the choir loft at the rear of the
temple began the opening bars of Schumann's Traumerei. And then, above
the cracked voice of the organ, rose the clear, poignant wail of a
violin. Theodore Brandeis had begun to play. You know the playing of
the average boy of fifteen--that nerve-destroying, uninspired scraping.
There was nothing of this in the sounds that this boy called forth
from the little wooden box and the stick with its taut lines of catgut.
Whatever it was--the length of the thin, sensitive fingers, the turn of
the wrist, the articulation of the forearm, the something in the brain,
or all these combined--Theodore Brandeis possessed that which makes for
greatness. You realized that as he crouched over his violin to get his
cello tones. As he played to-day the little congregation sat very still,
and each was thinking of his ambitions and his failures; of the lover
lost, of the duty left undone, of the hope deferred; of the wrong that
was never righted; of the lost one whose memory spells remorse. It felt
the salt taste on its lips. It put up a furtive, shamed hand to dab at
its cheeks, and saw that the one who sat in the pew just ahead was doing
likewise. This is what happened when this boy of fifteen wed