Mendel dropped his head. There was a moment of anxious silence. Bear thought deeply.
"I tell you what I'll do," said Bear at last. "I'll lend you five if you can manage to come out with that."
Mendel gave a great sigh of relief. "God shall bless you," he said. He wrung the sweater's hand passionately. "I dare say we shall find another sovereign's-worth to sell." Mendel clinched the borrowing by standing the lender a glass of rum, and Bear felt secure against the graver shocks of doom. If the worst come to the worst now, he had still had something for his money.
And so Mendel and Beenah sailed away over the Atlantic. Daniel accompanied them to Liverpool, but Miriam said she could not get a day's holiday—perhaps she remembered the rebuke Esther Ansell had drawn down on herself, and was chary of asking.
At the dock in the chill dawn, Mendel Hyams kissed his son Daniel on the forehead and said in a broken voice:
"Good-bye. God bless you." He dared not add and God bless your Bessie, my daughter-in-law to be; but the benediction was in his heart.
Daniel turned away heavy-hearted, but the old man touched him on the shoulder and said in a low tremulous voice:
"Won't you forgive me for putting you into the fancy goods?"
"Father! What do you mean?" said Daniel choking. "Surely you are not thinking of the wild words I spoke years and years ago. I have long forgotten them."
"Then you will remain a good Jew," said Mendel, trembling all over, "even when we are far away?"