"Answer me, now," he said, almost sternly. "Couldst thou love such a man, proscribed by his race, a byword and a mockery, to whom it is a sin against Heaven even to speak?" "They would not marry us," she breathed helplessly. "But couldst thou love me?" Her eyes drooped as she breathed, "The more for thy sufferings." But even in the ecstasy of this her acknowledgment, he had a chill undercurrent of consciousness that she did not understand; that, never having lived in an unpersecuted Jewish community, she had no real sense of its own persecuting power. Still, there was no need to remain in Amsterdam now: they would live together in some lonely spot, in the religion of Right Reason that he would teach her. So their hands came together again, and once their lips met. But the father was yet to be told of their sudden-born, sudden-grown love, and this with characteristic impulse Uriel did as soon as the old physician awoke. "God bless my soul!" said Dom Diego, "am I dreaming still?" His sense of dream increased when Uriel went on to repeat the story of his excommunication. "And the ban--is it still in force?" he interrupted. "It has not been removed," said Uriel sadly. The burly graybeard sprang to his feet. "And with such a brand upon thy brow thou didst dare speak to my daughter!" "Father!" cried Ianthe. "Father me not! He hath beguiled us here under false pretences. He hath made us violate the solemn decree of the synagogue. He is outlawed--he and his house and his food.--Sinner! The viands thou hast given us, what of them? Is thy meat ritually prepared?" "Thou, a man of culture, carest for these childish things?" "Childish things? Wherefore, then, have I left my Portugal?" "All ceremonies are against Right Reason," said Uriel in low tones, his face grown deadly white. "Now I see that thou hast never understood our holy and beautiful religion. Men of culture, forsooth! Is not our Amsterdam congregation full of men of culture--grammarians, poets, exegetes, philosophers, jurists, but flesh and blood, mark you, not diagrams, cut out of Euclid? Whence the cohesion of our race? Ceremony! What preserves and unifies its scattered atoms throughout the world? Ceremony! And what is ceremony? Poetry. 'Tis the tradition handed down from hoary antiquity; 'tis the color of life." "'Tis a miserable thraldom," interposed Uriel more feebly. "Miserable! A happy service. Hast never danced at the Rejoicing of the Law? Who so joyous as our brethren? Where so cheerful a creed? The trouble with thee is that thou hast no childish associations with our glorious religion, thou camest to it in manhood with naught but the cold eye of Reason." "But thou dost not accept every invention of Rabbinism. Surely in Porto thou didst not practise everything."