"The blind fools!" thought the boy, with ever growing bitterness. "To fancy that religion can lie in clothes, almost as if it was something you could carry in your pockets! But that's where most of their religion does lie--in their pocket." And he shuddered with a vision of greasy, huckstering fanatics. "And just imagine if I was sweet on a girl, having to see all her pretty hair cut off! As for those recruits, it served them right for not turning Christians. As if Judaism was any truer! And the old man never thinks of how he is torturing _me_--all the sharp little stones he makes _me_ kneel on." And, looking into the future with the ambitious eye of conscious cleverness, he saw the paternal gabardine over-glooming his life. II One Friday evening--after Isaac had completed his 'prentice years--there was anxiety in the Maggid's household in lieu of the Sabbath peace. Isaac's seat at the board was vacant. The twisted loaves seemed without salt, the wine of the consecration cup without savour. The mother was full of ominous explanations. "Perturb not the Sabbath," reproved the gabardined saint gently, and quoted the Talmud: "'No man has a finger maimed but 'tis decreed from above." "Isaac has gone to supper somewhere else," suggested his little sister, Miriam. "Children and fools speak the truth," said the Maggid, pinching her cheek. But they had to go to bed without seeing him, as though this were only a profane evening, and he amusing himself with the vague friends of his lithographic life. They waited till the candles flared out, and there seemed something symbolic in the gloom in which they groped their way upstairs. They were all shivering, too, for the fire had become gray ashes long since, the Sabbath Fire-Woman having made her last round at nine o'clock and they themselves being forbidden to touch even a candlestick or a poker. The sunrise revealed to the unclosed eyes of the mother that her boy's bed was empty. It also showed--what she might have discovered the night before had religion permitted her to enter his room with a light--that the room was empty, too: empty of his scattered belongings, of his books and sketches. "God in Heaven!" she cried. Her boy had run away. She began to wring her hands and wail with oriental amplitude, and would have torn her hair had it not been piously replaced by a black wig, neatly parted in the middle and now grotesquely placid amid her agonized agitation. The Maggid preserved more outward calm. "Perhaps we shall find him in synagogue," he said, trembling. "He has gone away, he will never come back. Woe is me!"