“Good-morning!” he cried, cheerfully. (The salutation “Good-morning” was beginning to go through Rosenstein like a knife each time he heard it.) “I did it. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did. I tell you, sir, there isn’t another paper-hanger in the city who could fill a job like that at such short notice. Every single room in the house! And red paper, too, which has to be handled so carefully, and makes the work take so much longer. But the job will be finished to-night, sir.” He walked off with the light tread and proud mien of a man who has accomplished something. Rosenstein looked after him bewildered. Then he turned to his wife, but when he saw the smile and the happy look that lit up her face he turned away and sighed. How could he tell her? “My love,” said Mrs. Rosenstein, after a long pause, “promise me one thing and I will be happy as long as I live.” Rosenstein was silent. In a vague way he was wondering if this promise was based upon some deed of yesterday that had not yet been revealed to him. “Promise me,” his wife went on, “that, no matter what happens, you will never become a drinker again.” Rosenstein sat bolt upright. He tried to speak. A hundred different words and phrases crowded to his lips, struggling for utterance. He became purple with suppressed excitement. In a wild endeavour to utter that promise so forcibly, so emphatically, and so fiercely as not only to assure his wife, but to relieve his suffering feelings, Rosenstein could only sputter incoherently. Then, suddenly realising the futility of the endeavour, and feeling that his whole vocabulary was inadequate to express the vehemence of his emotion, he gurgled helplessly: “Yes. I promise.” And he kept the promise. THE POISONED CHAI Bernstein sat in the furthest corner of the café, brooding. The fiercest torments that plague the human heart were rioting within him, as if they would tear him asunder. Bernstein was of an impulsive, overbearing nature, mature as far as years went, yet with the untrained, inexperienced emotions of a savage. To such natures the “no” from a woman’s lips comes like a blow; the sudden knowledge that those same lips can smile brightly upon another follows like molten lead. That whole afternoon Bernstein had suffered the wildest tortures of jealousy. Had Natzi been a younger man Bernstein’s resentment might not have turned so hotly upon him. Yet Natzi was almost of his own age, a weak-faced creature, with an eternal smile, incapable of intense feeling, ignorant of even the faintest shade of that passion which he (Bernstein) had laid so humbly, so tenderly at her feet—and it was Natzi she loved! Bernstein’s hand darted to his inner pocket and came forth clutching a tiny object upon which he gazed with the look of a fiend. “I may not have her,” he murmured, “but she will never belong to him.”