"This is only the beginning of it," the other returned, in whispered exultation. "Wait till you get deeper into it. And then there are other books, far more interesting." "Say, young fellow!" Asriel said to Shaya's teacher a week or so later; "you need not trouble your righteous legs to bring you here any more. You are getting too thick with the boy." Shaya now found no difficulty in plodding through the theorems and problems unaided. But he yearned after his teacher and friend, and for several days could relish neither his Talmud nor his contraband Geometry. He grew restless. His soul was languishing with thirst. "Guess where I have been," he confidentially said to Flora, coming from the street one afternoon. He spoke in Yiddish, and she answered in English, interspersed with the same dialect. "Not in the synagogue, studying?" she queried. "No--at the Astor Library," he whispered. "They have such a lot of books there, Flora! Upstairs and downstairs--large rooms like rich synagogues, with shelves all over the walls, and all full of books. Have you ever been there, Flora?" "N-no!" she owned, with reluctance. The "holy soul" was clearly forging ahead of her in a world which she considered all her own; and she hated the idea of it, and liked it at the same time. "What did you there?" "I just looked at the books--oh, what a lot!--and then I found out how to get a Geometry,--they have everything in the world, I tell you,--and I did some problems. Don't tell your father I was there." "Of course I won't," she said intimately. "Can ladies come in?" "Certainly; they have a separate place for them, though; will you go there with me?" "Some day," she rejoined evasively. "Will you? Oh, it's so nice to be sitting and reading there! Only you must sit still. I forgot myself, and as I was figuring out some nice point, I began to reason aloud, so a fine old gentleman stepped up to my side and touched me on the shoulder. Oh, I got so scared, Flora! But he did not do me anything--may I be ill if he did. He only told me to be quiet." Flora burst out laughing. "I'll bet you, you was singing in that funny way you have when you are studying the Talmud." "Yes," he admitted joyfully. "And working your hands and shaking the life out of yourself," she pursued, mimicking his gestures. "No, I was not--may I not live till to-morrow if I was," he protested vehemently, with a touch of resentment. "Oh, it is so nice to be there! I never knew there were so many Gentile books in the world at all. I wonder what they are all about. Only I am so troubled about my English." He interrupted himself, with a distressed air. "When I asked them for the book, and how to get it, they could not understand me." "_I_ can understand everything you say when you speak English. You're all right," she comforted him. His troubled, childlike smile and his shining clear blue eyes, as he spoke, went to her heart.