"Ah, stranger!" she said, with a gracious smile. "You return to us."
"You recognize me?" I mumbled, in amaze.
"It is the face I loved in youth," she said simply.
Strange, happy, wistful tears sprang to my old eyes—some blurred sense of youth and love and God.
"Your youth seems with you still," I said. "Your face is as sweet, your voice as full of music."
The old ecstatic look lit up her eyes. "It is God who keeps me ever young, till the great day dawns."
I was taken aback. What! She believed still! That alternative had not figured in my prevision of pathetic closes. I was silent, but the old tumult of thought raged within me.
"But is not the day passed forever?" I murmured at last.
The light in her eyes became queenly fire.
"While there is life," she cried, "in the veins of the house of Ben David!" And as she spoke my eye caught the gleam of the Persian emerald on her forefinger.