'_Ach, mein Herr_'--she jumped responsively into German--'it was for joy I was crying, not sorrow.' As her American was Germanic, so was her German like the Yiddish of his remote youth, and this, adding to the sweetness of her voice, dissolved the musician's heart within his breast. He noted now with satisfaction that her fingers were bare of rings. 'Then I am rejoiced too,' he ventured to reply. She smiled pathetically, and began to walk back towards her cabin. 'With us Jews,' she said, 'tears and laughter are very close.' 'Us Jews!' He winced a little. It was so long since he had been thus classed to his face by a stranger. But perhaps he had misinterpreted her phrase; it was her way of referring to _her_ race, not necessarily to _his_. 'It is a beautiful night,' he murmured uneasily. But he only opened wider the flood-gates of race-feeling. 'Yes,' she replied simply, 'and such a heaven of stars is beginning to arise over the night of Israel. Is it not wonderful--the transformation of our people? When I left Russia as a girl--so young,' she interpolated with a sad smile, 'that I had not even been married--I left a priest-ridden, paralysed people, a cringing, cowering, contorted people--I shall never forget the panic in our synagogue when a troop of Cossacks rode in with a bogus blood-accusation. Now it is a people alive with ideas and volitions; the young generation dreams noble dreams, and, what is stranger, dies to execute them. Our _Bund_ is the soul of the Russian revolution; our self-defence bands are bringing back the days of Judas Maccabaeus. In the olden times of massacre our people fled to the synagogues to pray; now they march to the fight like men.' They had arrived at her door, and she ended suddenly. The musician, fascinated, feared she was about to fade away within. 'But Jews can't fight!' he cried, half-incredulous, half to arrest her.