In the drawing-room of this house Mrs. Sachs and her daughter were sitting on the day of Reuben’s return from his six months’ absence. He had arrived early in the day, and was now sleeping off the effects of a night passed in travelling, and of the plentiful supply of fatted calf with which he had been welcomed. His devoted womankind meanwhile sipped their tea in the fading light of the September afternoon, and talked over the event of the day in the rapid, nervous tones peculiar to them. Mrs. Sachs was an elderly woman, stout and short, with a wide, sallow, impassive face, lighted up by occasional gleams of shrewdness from a pair of half-shut eyes. An indescribable air of intense, but subdued vitality characterized her presence; she did not appear in good health, but you saw at a glance that this was an old lady whom it would be difficult to kill. “He looks better, Addie, he looks very well indeed,” she said, the dull red spot of colour on either sallow cheek alone testifying to her excitement. “I have said all along,” answered her daughter, “that if Reuben had been a poor man the doctors would never have found out that he wanted a sea-voyage at all. Let us only hope that it has done him no harm professionally.” She emptied her tea-cup as she spoke, and cut herself a fresh slice of the rich cake which she was devouring with nervous voracity. Adelaide Sachs, or to give her her right title, Mrs. Montagu Cohen, was a thin, dark young woman of eight or nine-and-twenty, with a restless, eager, sallow face, and an abrupt manner. She was richly and very fashionably dressed in an unbecoming gown of green shot silk, and wore big diamond solitaires in her ears. She and her mother indeed were never seen without such jewels, which seemed to bear the same relation to their owners as his pigtail does to the Chinaman. Adelaide was the eldest of the family; she had married young a husband chosen for her, with whom she lived with average contentment. Reuben was scarcely two years her junior; no one cared to remember the age of Lionel, the youngest of the three, a hopeless ne’er-do-weel, who had with difficulty been relegated to an obscure colony. “There is always either a ne’er-do-weel or an idiot in every Jewish family!” Esther Kohnthal had remarked in one of her appalling bursts of candour. The mother and daughter sat there in the growing dusk, amid the plush ottomans, stamped velvet tables, and other Philistine splendours of the large drawing-room, till the lamp-lighter came down the Bayswater Road and the gilt clock on the mantelpiece struck six. Almost at the same moment the door was flung open and a voice cried: “Why _do_ women invariably sit in the dark?” It was a pleasant voice; to a fine ear, unmistakably the voice of a Jew, though the accents of the speaker were free from the cockney twang which marred the speech of the two women. “Reuben! I thought you were asleep,” cried his mother.