"But my sister has nothing the matter with her--nothing. O _gnädiger Herr_, have pity. The Königsberg doctor--the great doctor--told me I had no disease, no disease at all. And even if I have, my sister's eyes are pure as the sunshine. Look, _mein Herr_, look again. See," and she held up Biela's eyelids and passionately kissed the wet bewildered eyes. "She is to be married, my lamb--her bridegroom awaits her on the wharf. Send _me_ back, _gnädiger Herr_; I ought not to have come. But for God's sake, don't keep Biela out, don't." She wrung her hands. But the marriage card had been played too often in that hall of despairing dodges. "Oh, _Herr Doktor_," and she kissed the coat-tail of the ship's doctor, "plead for us; speak a word for her." The ship's doctor spoke a word on his own behalf. It was he who had endorsed the two girls' health-certificates at Hamburg, and he would be blamed by the Steamship Company, which would have to ship the sisters back free, and even defray their expenses while in quarantine at the dépôt. He ridiculed the idea that the girls were suffering from anything contagious. But the native doctor frowned, immovable. Leah grew hysteric. It was the first time in her life she had lost her sane standpoint. "Your own eye is affected," she shrieked, her dark pock-marked face almost black with desperate anger, "if you cannot see that it is only because my sister has been weeping, because she is ill from the voyage. But she carries no infection--she is healthy as an ox, and her eye is the eye of an eagle!" She was ordered to be silent, but she shrieked angrily, "The German doctors know, but the Americans have no _Bildung_." "Oh, don't, Leah," moaned Biela, throwing her arms round the panting breast. "What's the use?" But the irrepressible Leah got an S.I. ticket of Special Inquiry, forced a hearing in the Commissioners' Court. "Let her in, kind gentlemen, and send back the other one. Tsirrélé will go back with me. It does not matter about the little one." The kind gentlemen on the bench were really kind, but America must be protected. "You can take the young one and the old one both back with you," the interpreter told her. "But they are the only ones we can let in." Leah and Biela were driven back among the damned. The favoured twain stood helplessly in their happier compartment. Even Tsirrélé, the squirrel, was dazed. Presently the spruce Srul arrived--to find the expected raptures replaced by funereal misery. He wormed his way dizzily into the cage of the rejected. It was not the etiquette of the Pale to kiss one's betrothed bride, but Srul stared dully at Biela without even touching her hand, as if the Atlantic already rolled again between them. Here was a pretty climax to the dreams of years! "My poor Srul, we must go back to Hamburg to be married," faltered Biela. "And give up my store?" Srul wailed. "Here the dollar spins round. We have now what one names a boom. There is no land on earth like ours."