“We are all here,” cried Adelaide, when greetings had been exchanged, “with the exception of the hero of the feast.”
“Who has evidently,” added Esther, “a sense of dramatic propriety.”
“Reuben is at his club,” explained Mrs. Sachs, looking under her eyelids at Judith, who had taken a seat opposite her.
She admired the girl immensely, and at the bottom of her heart was fond of her.
Judith, on her part, would have found it hard to define her feelings towards Mrs. Sachs.
With Reuben she was always calm; in his mother’s presence she was conscious of a strange agitation, of the stirrings of an emotion which was neither love, nor hate, nor fear, but which perhaps was compounded of all three.
They had not long to wait before the door was thrown open and the person expected entered.
He came straight across the room to old Solomon, a vivifying presence—Reuben Sachs, with his bad figure, awkward movements, and charming face, which wore to-night its air of greatest alertness.
The old man, who had finished his prayers and taken off his cap, greeted the newcomer with something like emotion. Solomon Sachs, if report be true, had been a hard man in his dealings with the world; never overstepping the line of legal honesty, but taking an advantage wherever he could do so with impunity.
But to his own kindred he had always been generous; the ties of race, of family, were strong with him. His love for his children had been the romance of an eminently unromantic career; and the death of his favourite son, Reuben’s father, had been a grief whose marks he would bear to his own dying day.