She came. Sarah stared at her for an instant with poignant curiosity, then her eyelids drooped to shut out the dazzle of her youth and freshness. Herzel's wife moved awkwardly and sheepishly. But she was beautiful--a buxom, comely country girl from a Russian village, with a swelling bust and a cheek rosy with health and confusion. Sarah's breast was racked by a thousand needles. But she found breath at last. "God bless--thee, Mrs.--Kretznow," she said gaspingly. She took the girl's hand. "How good thou art to come and see a sick creature." "My husband willed it," the new wife said in deprecation. She had a simple, stupid air that did not seem wholly due to the constraint of the strange situation. "Thou wast right to obey. Be good to him, my child. For three years he waited on me, when I lay helpless. He has suffered much. Be good to him!" With an impulsive movement she drew the girl's head down to her and kissed her on the lips. Then with an anguished cry of "Leave me for to-day," she jerked the blanket over her face and burst into tears. She heard the couple move hesitatingly away. The girl's beauty shone on her through the opaque coverings. "O God!" she wailed. "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, let me die now. For the merits of the Patriarchs take me soon, take me soon." Her vain passionate prayer, muffled by the bedclothes, was wholly drowned by ear-piercing shrieks from the ward above--screams of agony mingled with half-articulate accusations of attempted poisoning--the familiar paroxysm of the palsied woman who clung to life. The thrill passed again through Sister Margaret. She uplifted her sweet humid eyes. "Ah, Christ!" she whispered. "If I could die for her!" * * * * * XI THE SABBATH-BREAKER * * * * * XI THE SABBATH-BREAKER The moment came near for the Polish centenarian grandmother to die. From the doctor's statement it appeared she had only a bad quarter of an hour to live. Her attack had been sudden, and the grandchildren she loved to scold could not be present. She had already battled through the great wave of pain, and was drifting beyond the boundaries of her earthly Refuge. The nurses, forgetting the trouble her querulousness and her overweening dietary scruples had cost them, hung over the bed on which the shrivelled entity lay. They did not know she was living again through the one great episode of her life. Nearly forty years back, when (though already hard upon seventy and a widow) a Polish village was all her horizon, she received a letter. It arrived on the eve of Sabbath on a day of rainy summer. It was from her little boy--her only boy--who kept a country inn seven-and-thirty miles away, and had a family. She opened the letter with feverish anxiety. Her son--her _Kaddish_--was the apple of her eye. The old woman eagerly perused the Hebrew script, from right to left. Then weakness overcame her and she nearly fell.