'No, the two are one to me. Somehow you seem to stand for Judaism, too. I cannot disentwine my hopes; I have come to conceive your life as an allegory of Judaism, the offspring of a great and tragic past with the germs of a rich blossoming, yet wasting with an inward canker. I have grown to think of its future as somehow bound up with yours. I want to see your eyes laughing, the shadows lifted from your brow; I want to see you face life courageously, not in passionate revolt nor in passionless despair, but in faith and hope and the joy that springs from them. I want you to seek peace, not in a despairing surrender of the intellect to the faith of childhood, but in that faith intellectually justified. And while I want to help you, and to fill your life with the sunshine it needs, I want you to help me, to inspire me when I falter, to complete my life, to make me happier than I had ever dreamed. Be my wife, Esther. Let me save you from yourself.' 'Let me save you from yourself, Raphael. Is it wise to wed with the grey spirit of the Ghetto that doubts itself?' And like a spirit she glided from his grasp and disappeared in the crowd. CHAPTER XVII THE PRODIGAL SON The New Year dawned upon the Ghetto, heralded by a month of special matins and the long-sustained note of the ram's horn. It was in the midst of the Ten Days of Repentance which find their awful climax in the Day of Atonement that a strange letter for Hannah came to startle the breakfast-table at Reb Shemuel's. Hannah read it with growing pallor and perturbation. 'What is the matter, my dear?' asked the Reb anxiously. 'Oh, father,' she cried, 'read this! Bad news of Levi.' A spasm of pain contorted the old man's furrowed countenance. 'Mention not his name!' he said harshly. 'He is dead.' 'He may be by now!' Hannah exclaimed agitatedly. 'You were right, Esther. He did join a strolling company, and now he is laid up with typhoid in the hospital in Stockbridge. One of his friends writes to tell us. He must have caught it in one of those insanitary dressing-rooms we were reading about.' Esther trembled all over. The scene in the garret when the fatal telegram came announcing Benjamin's illness had never faded from her mind. She had an instant conviction that it was all over with poor Levi. 'My poor lamb!' cried the Rebbitzin, the coffee cup dropping from her nerveless hand. 'Simcha,' said Reb Shemuel sternly, 'calm thyself; we have no son to lose. The Holy One--blessed be He!--hath taken him from us. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh. Blessed be the name of the Lord.' Hannah rose. Her face was white and resolute. She moved towards the door. 'Whither goest thou?' inquired her father in German. 'I am going to my room, to put on my hat and jacket,' replied Hannah quietly. 'Whither goest thou?' repeated Reb Shemuel. 'To Stockbridge. Mother, you and I must go at once.' The Reb sprang to his feet. His brow was dark; his eyes gleamed with anger and pain.