Somebody's foot tapped in a corner. He resumed. "_Yah_, a gun pointing at him through a chink. What was there to do, I ask you? If they fired--well, they fired, and he was dead. If they didn't fire, he was alive. And if a man's alive, a man must live. Not so? So he took his quill in his hand again ... and he heard a little noise in the wall behind him. He looked round. Another gun. There, held by unseen hands in the night. Another gun. Pointing at him. Two guns pointing at him. He turned round to his table again. A Jew's not a Jew for nothing. He said a few blessings. Thou hearest, Feivel?" turning to Philip. Philip swallowed a lump in his throat fearfully. He was afraid to answer. It was perhaps one of those rhetorical questions to which an answer was somehow, mysteriously, an offence. He thrust his head deeper into his hands and blinked. "He said a few blessings," Reb Monash repeated, to press the moral home upon his listeners. "Well, what will you? He was a good clerk, very neat. And while the minutes in his clock were ticking as slowly as the years during the Time of Bondage, his figures he brought over from column to column. When came the first sign of morning so that the lamp shone less strongly on the two guns in the walls there, pointed at his heart," these last words with slow emphasis and repeated, "pointed at his heart--he dipped his head and hands into his bowl of water, took out his _tallus_ and his _tephilim_; and when he was passing the strap round his arm, he heard very faintly the guns withdrawn through the chinks in the walls. But he could hear no feet creeping away. Besides, he was _davenning_; how could he listen to anything else? It's only God you must think about when you're _davenning_, no? "He finished when it was already day in his hut. His beard--it was a small beard, only a young man's beard--was grey, like the snow in Angel Street. He did his accounts so well, did Mendel, the Red One--they always called him the Red One, even after that night, and strangers wondered why Red One--so well, that the merchant he worked for increased his wages by a rouble a month soon after. Oh, a Russia it was! What say you?" By this time Mrs. Levine, from Number Seven, was soaked in tears, her face, her blouse, and even the flour on her apron was streaky and damp. She had come in half-way through, but any anecdote, sad or merry, or merely a parable to illustrate a point of law, invariably reduced her to tears.