"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"
She let her lids droop. "Oh, how—how I hope you have, Leon."
"When?"
"In the spring?"
"That's it—in the spring."
Then they smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to be linked up.
Suddenly there burst in Abrahm Kantor, in a carefully rehearsed gale of bluster.
"Quick, Leon! I got the car down-stairs. Just fifteen minutes to make the ferry. Quick! The sooner we get him over there the sooner we get him back! I'm right, mamma? Now, now! No waterworks! Get your brother's suit-case, Isadore. Now, now! No nonsense! Quick—quick—"
With a deftly manoeuvered round of good-bys, a grip-laden dash for the door, a throbbing moment of turning back when it seemed as though Sarah Kantor's arms could not unlock their deadlock of him, Leon Kantor was out and gone, the group of faces point-etched into the silence behind him.
The poor, mute face of Mannie, laughing softly. Rosa Kantor crying into her hands. Esther, grief-crumpled, but rich in the enormous hope of youth. The sweet Gina, to whom the waiting months had already begun their reality.