Now came an enchanting season of confidences; the mother, caught up in the glow of this strange love, learning to see the girl through the boy's eyes, though the only aid to his eloquence was the photograph of a plump little blonde with bewitching dimples. The time was not ripe yet for bringing Lucy and her together, he explained. In fact, he hadn't actually proposed. His mother understood he was waiting for the year of mourning to be up.

'But how will you be married?' she once asked.

'Oh, there's the registrar,' he said carelessly.

'But can't you make her a proselyte?' she ventured timidly.

He coloured. 'It would be absurd to suddenly start talking religion to her.'

'But she knows you're a Jew.'

'Oh, I dare say. I never hid it from her brother, so why shouldn't she know? But her father's a bit of a crank, so I rather avoid the subject.'

'A crank? About Jews?'

'Well, old Winstay has got it into his noddle that the Jews are responsible for the war—and that they leave the fighting to the English. It's rather sickening: even in South Africa we are not treated as we should be, considering——'

Her dark eye lost its pathetic humility. 'But how can he say that, when you yourself—when you saved his——'

'Well, I suppose just because he knows I was fighting, he doesn't think of me as a Jew. It's a bit [80]illogical, I know.' And he smiled ruefully. 'But, then, logic is not the old boy's strong point.'

'He seemed such a nice old man,' said Mrs. Cohn, as she recalled the photograph of the white-haired cherub writing with a quill at a property desk.

'Oh, off his hobby-horse he's a dear old boy. That's why I don't help him into the saddle.'

'But how can he be ignorant that we've sent seven hundred at least to the war?' she persisted. 'Why, the paper had all their photographs!'

'What paper?' said Simon, laughing. 'Do you suppose he reads the Jewish what's-a-name, like you? Why, he's never heard of it!'

'Then you ought to show him a copy.'

'Oh, mother!' and he laughed again. 'That would only prove to him there are too many Jews everywhere.'

A cloud began to spread over Mrs. Cohn's hard-won content. But apparently it only shadowed her own horizon. Simon was as happily full of his Lucy as ever.

Nevertheless, there came a Sunday evening when Simon returned from Harrow earlier than his wont, and Hannah's dog-like eye noted that the cloud had at last reached............