'"Pawn your hide, but get a bride,"' quoted the old lady savagely.
As for the slighted marriage-broker, he remonstrated almost like a relative.
'But I didn't want a negotiated marriage,' Elias protested.
'A love marriage I could also have arranged for you,' replied Sugarman indignantly.
But Elias was quite content with his own arrangement, for Fanny's glance was melting and her touch transporting. To deck that soft warm hand with an engagement-ring, a month's wages had not seemed disproportionate, and Fanny flashed the diamond bewitchingly. It lit up the gloomy workshop with its signal of felicity. Even Belcovitch, bent over his press-iron, sometimes omitted to rebuke Fanny's badinage.
The course of true love seemed to run straight to the Canopy—Fanny had already worked the bridegroom's praying shawl—when suddenly a storm broke. At first the cloud was no bigger than a man's hand—in fact, it was a man's hand. Elias espied it groping for Fanny's in the dim space between the two machines. As Fanny's fingers fluttered towards it, her other hand still guiding the cloth under the throbbing needle, Elias felt the needle stabbing his heart up and down, through and through. The very finger that held his costly ring lay in this alien paw gratis.
The shameless minx! Ah, his relatives were right. He snapped the scissors savagely like a dragon's jaw.
'Fanny, what dost thou?' he gasped in Yiddish.
Fanny's face flamed; her guilty fingers flew back.
'I thought thou wast on the other side,' she breathed.