Turning with morbid interest to look after the retreating millionaire, he found him in converse with a feminine figure at the open door of a deck-cabin. Could this be the great She, the arbitress of art? He moved nearer. Why, this was but a girl—nay, unless his instinct was at fault, a Jewish girl—a glorious young Jewess, of that radiant red-haired type which the Russian Pale occasionally flowered with. What was she doing with this Christian Colossus? He tried vainly to see her left hand; the mere possibility that she might be Mrs. Wilhammer shocked his Semitic instinct. Wilhammer disappeared within—the relation was obviously intimate—but the girl still stood at the door, a brooding magical figure.

Almost a sense of brotherhood moved him to speak to her, but he conquered the abnormal and incorrect impulse, contenting himself to walk past her with a side-glance, while at the end of the deck-promenade, instead of returning on his footsteps, he even arched his path round to the windy side. After some minutes of buffeting he returned chilled to his prior pacing ground. She was still there, but had moved under the same electric light which had illuminated Wilhammer's face, and she was reading a letter. As his walk carried him past her, he was startled to see tears rolling down [356]those radiant cheeks. A slight exclamation came involuntarily from him; the girl, even more startled to be caught thus, relaxed her grip of the letter—a puff of wind hastened to whirl it aloft. Rozenoffski grasped at it desperately, but it eluded him, and then descending sailed sternwards. He gave chase, stumbling over belated chairs and deck-quoits, but at last it was safe in his clutch, and as he handed it to the agitated owner whom he found at his elbow, he noted with a thrill that the characters were cursive Hebrew.

'How can I zank you, sir!' Her Teutonic-touched American gave him the courage to reply gallantly in German:

'By letting me help you more seriously.'

'Ach, mein Herr'—she jumped responsively into German—'it was for joy I was crying, not sorrow.' As her American was Germanic, so was her German like the Yiddish of his remote youth, and this, adding to the sweetness of her voice, dissolved the musician's heart within his breast. He noted now with satisfaction that her fingers were bare of rings.

'Then I am rejoiced too,' he ventured to reply.

She smiled pathetically, and began to walk back towards her cabin. 'With us Jews,' she said, 'tears and laughter are very close.'

'Us Jews!' He winced a little. It was so long since he had been thus classed to his face by a stranger. But perhaps he had misinterpreted her phrase; it was her way of referring to her race, not necessarily to his.

'It is a beautiful night,' he murmured uneasily. But he only opened wider the flood-gates of race-feeling.

'Yes,' she replied simply, 'and such a heaven of [357]stars is beginning to arise over the night of Israel. Is it not wonderful—the transformation of our people? When I left Russia as a girl—so young,' she interpolated with a sad smile, 'that I had not even been married—I left a priest-ridden, paralysed people, a cringing, cowering, contorted people—I shall never forget the panic in our synagogue when a troop of Cossacks rode in with a bogus blood-accusation. Now it is a people alive with ideas and volitions; the young generation dreams noble dreams, and, what is stranger, dies to execute them. Our Bund is the soul of the Russian revolution; our self-defe............