"Yes, yes." His eyes filled with tears. He saw the row of innocent girl faces at the white Sabbath table. What had London and prosperity brought him instead? "And then the Atonement days, when the ram's horn thrilled us with a sense of sin and judgment, when we thought the heavenly scrolls were being signed and sealed. Who feels that here, father? Some of us don't even fast." "True, true." He forgot his part. "Then you are a good Jewess still?" She shook her head sadly. "We have outlived our destiny. Our isolation is a meaningless relic." But she had kindled a new spark of hope. "Can't you bring him over to us?" "To what? To our empty synagogues?" "Then you are going over to him?" He tried to keep his voice steady. "I must; his father is an archdeacon." "I know, I know," he said, though she might as well have said an archangel. "But you do not believe in--in--" "I believe in self-sacrifice; that is Christianity." "Is it? I thought it was three Gods." "That is not the essential." "Thank God!" he said. Then he added hurriedly: "But will you be happy with him? Such different bringing up! You can't really feel close to him." She laughed and blushed. "There are deeper things than one's bringing up, father." "But if after marriage you should have a quarrel, he would always throw up to you that you are a Jewess." "No, Alfred will never do that." "Then make haste, little Schnapsie, or your old father won't live to see you under the canopy." She smiled happily, believing him. "But there won't be any canopy," she said. "Well, well, whatever it is," he laughed back, with horrid imagining that it might be a Cross. IX It was agreed between them that, to avoid endless family councils, the sisters should not be told, and that the ceremony should be conducted as privately as possible. The archdeacon himself was coming up to town to perform the ceremony in the church of another of his sons in Chalk Farm. After the short honeymoon, Daniel was to come and live with the couple in Whitechapel, for they were to live in the centre of their labours. Poor Daniel tried to find some comfort in the thought that Whitechapel was a more Jewish and a homelier quarter than Highbury. But the unhomely impression produced upon him by his latest son-in-law neutralized everything. All his other sons-in-law had more or less awed him, but beneath the awe ran a tunnel of brotherhood. With this Alfred, however, he was conscious of a glacial current, which not all the young man's cordiality could tepefy. "Are you sure you will be happy with him, little Schnapsie?" he asked anxiously. "You dear worrying old thing!" "But if after marriage you quarrel, he will always throw it up to you that you are--" "And I'll throw it up to him that he is a Christian, and oughtn't to quarrel." He was silenced. But his heart thanked God that his dear old wife had been spared the coming ordeal. "This too was for good," he murmured, in the Hebrew proverb.