How could he bear to sit there, drawling out these facts to Israel Leuniger, which in the natural course of things should have been poured forth for her private benefit in delicious confidence and sympathy? Esther, who was spending the evening with her cousins, came and sat beside her. “You are putting green silk instead of blue into those cornflowers,” she cried. Judith lifted her head and met the other’s curious, penetrating glance. “When I was a little girl,” cried Esther, still looking at her, “a little girl of eight years old, I wrote in my prayer-book: ‘Cursed art Thou, O Lord my God, Who hast had the cruelty to make me a woman.’ And I have gone on saying that prayer all my life--the only one.” Judith stared at her as she sat there, self-conscious, melodramatic, anxious for effect. She never knew if mere whim or a sudden burst of cruelty had prompted her words. “According to your own account, Esther,” she said, “you must always have been a little beast.” Esther chuckled. Judith went on sewing, but changed her silks. She wondered if the evening would never end, and yet she did not want Reuben to go. He rose at last and made his farewells. Judith put out her hand carelessly as he approached her, then, drawn by an irresistible magnetism, lifted her eyes to his. As she did so, from Reuben’s eyes flashed out a long melancholy glance of passion, of entreaty, of renunciation; and once again, even from the depths of her own humiliation, arose that strange, yearning sentiment of pity, with which this man, who was strong, ruthless and successful, had such power of inspiring her. Only for a moment did their eyes meet, the next she had turned hers away--had in her turn grown cold and unresponsive. How dared he look at her thus? How dared he profane that holiest of sorrows, the sorrow of those who love and are by fate separated? CHAPTER XV. Wer nie sein Brod mit Thraenen ass, Wer nie die kummervollen Naechte Auf seinem Bette weinend sass, Der Kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlische Maechte! GOETHE. There was a little set of shelves in Judith’s bedroom which contained the whole of her modest library, some twenty books in all--_Lorna Doone_; Carlyle’s _Sterling_; Macaulay’s _Essays_; _Hypatia_; _The Life of Palmerston_; the _Life of Lord Beaconsfield_: these were among her favourites, and they had all been given to her by Reuben Sachs. Like many wholly unliterary people, she preferred the mildly instructive even in her fiction. It was a matter of surprise to her that clever creatures, like Leo and Esther for instance, should pass whole days when the fit was on in the perusal of such works as _Cometh Up as a Flower_, and _Molly Bawn_. But it was not novels, even the less frivolous ones, that Judith cared for.