Quand il pâlit un soir, et que sa voix tremblante S’éteignit tout à coup dans un mot commencé; Quand ses yeux, soulevant leur paupière brûlante, Me blessèrent d’un mal dont je le crus blessé; * * * * * Il n’aimait pas--j’aimais. M. DESBORDES VALMORE. Old Solomon Sachs awaited his guests in the drawing-room of his house in Portland Place. It was the night after Reuben’s arrival, in honour of which the feast was given. Such feasts were by no means rare events, the old man liking to assemble his family round him in true patriarchal fashion. As for the family, it always grumbled and always went. He was a short, sturdy-looking man, with a flowing white beard, which added size to a head already out of all proportion to the rest of him. The enormous face was both powerful and shrewd; there was power too in the coarse, square hands, in the square, firmly-planted feet. You saw at a glance that he was blest with that fitness of which survival is the inevitable reward. He wore a skull-cap, and, at the present moment, was pacing the room, performing what seemed to be an incantation in Hebrew below his breath. As a matter of fact, he was saying his prayers, an occupation which helped him to get rid of a great deal of his time, which hung heavily on his hands, now that age had disabled him from active service on the Stock Exchange. His daughter Rebecca, a woman far advanced in middle-life, stitched drearily at some fancy-work by the fire. She was unmarried, and hated the position with the frank hatred of the women of her race, for whom it is a peculiarly unenviable one. Reuben’s mother, her daughter and son-in-law, were the first to arrive. Old Solomon shook hands with them, still continuing his muttered devotions, and they received in silence a greeting to which they were too much accustomed to consider in any way remarkable. “Grandpapa saying his prayers,” was an everyday phenomenon. Perhaps the younger members of the party remembered that it had never been allowed to interfere with the production of cake; the generous slices had not been less welcome from the fact that they must be eaten without acknowledgment. Montague Cohen, Adelaide Sachs’s husband, belonged to that rapidly dwindling section of the Community which attaches importance to the observation of the Mosaic and Rabbinical laws in various minute points. He would have half-starved himself sooner than eat meat killed according to Gentile fashion, or leavened bread in the Passover week. Adelaide chafed at the restrictions imposed by this constant making clean of the outside of the cup and platter; but it was a point on which her husband, amenable in everything else, remained firm. He was an anæmic young man, destitute of the more brilliant qualities of his race, with a rooted belief in himself and every thing that belonged to him.