“So I was. Now I have arisen like a giant refreshed.” A man of middle height and slender build had made his way across the room to the window; his face was indistinct in the darkness as he stooped and put his arm caressingly about the broad, fat shoulder of his mother. “Dressed for dinner already, Reuben?” was all she said, though the hard eye under the cautious old eyelid grew soft as she spoke. Her love for this son and her pride in him were the passion of her life. “Dinner? You are never going to kill the fatted calf twice over? But seriously, I must run down to the club for an hour or two. There may be letters.” He hesitated a moment, then added: “I shall look in at the Leunigers on my way back.” “The Leunigers!” cried Adelaide in open disapproval. “Reuben, there’s the old gentleman. He won’t like your going first to your cousins,” said his mother. “My grandfather? Oh, but my arrival isn’t an official fact till to-morrow. We were sixteen hours before our time, remember. Good-bye, Addie. I suppose you and Monty will be dining in Portland Place to-morrow with the rest of us. What a gathering of the clans! Well, I must be off.” And he suited the action to the word. “Why on earth need he rush off like that to the Leunigers?” said Mrs. Cohen as she drew on her gloves. Her mother looked across at her through the dusk. “Reuben will do nothing rash,” she said. CHAPTER II. Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly. _London Lyrics._ Reuben Sachs stepped into the twilit street with a distinct sense of exhilaration. He was back again; back to the old, full, strenuous life which was so dear to him; to the din and rush and struggle of the London which he loved with a passion that had something of poetry in it. With the eager curiosity, the vivid interest in life, which underlay his rather impassive bearing, it was impossible that foreign travel should be without charm for him; but he returned with unmixed delight to his own haunts; to the work and the play; the market-place, and the greetings in the market-place; to the innumerable pleasantnesses of an existence which owed something of its piquancy to the fact that it was led partly in the democratic atmosphere of modern London, partly in the conservative precincts of the Jewish community. Now as he lingered a moment on the pavement, looking up and down the road for a hansom, the light from the street lamp fell full upon him, revealing what the darkness of his mother’s drawing-room had previously hidden from sight. He was, as I have said, of middle height and slender build. He wore good clothes, but they could not disguise the fact that his figure was bad, and his movements awkward; unmistakably the figure and movements of a Jew. And his features, without presenting any marked national trait, bespoke no less clearly his Semitic origin.