"Kisshuf (witchcraft)!" whispered her mother, terrified into her native idiom. The passage lay before them, entirely bare of all its familiar colour and furniture: the framed engravings depicting the trials of William Lord Russell, in the Old Bailey, and Earl Stafford in Westminster Hall, the flower-pots on the hall table, the proudly purchased hat-rack, the metal umbrella-stand, all gone! And beyond, facing them, lay the parlour, an equally forlorn vacancy striking like a blast of chilly wind through its wide-open door.
"Thieves!" cried Mrs. Brill, reverting from the supernatural and the Yiddish. "Murder! I'm ruined! They've stolen my house!"
"Hush! Hush!" said Salvina, strung to calm by her mother's incoherence. "Let us see first what has really happened."
"Happened! Haven't you got eyes in your head? All the fruit of my years of toil!" And Mrs. Brill wrung her jewelled hands. "Your father would have me call on those Sperlings, though I told him they'd be glad to dance on my tomb. And why didn't Lazarus stay at home?"
"You know he has to be out looking for work."
"And my gilt clock that I trembled even to wind up, and the big vase with the picture on it, and my antimacassars, and my beautiful couch that nobody had ever sat upon! Oh my God, oh my God!"
Leaving her mother moaning out a complete inventory in the passage, Salvina advanced into the violated parlour. It was an aching void. On the bare mantelpiece, just where the gilt clock had announced a perpetual half-past two, gleamed an unstamped letter. She took it up wonderingly. It was in her father's schoolboyish hand, addressed to her mother. She opened it, as usual, for Mrs. Brill did not even know the alphabet, and refused steadily to make its acquaintance, to the ironic humiliation of the Board School teacher.
"You would not let me give you Get," [ran the letter abruptly], "so you have only yourself to blame. I have left the clothes in the bed-rooms, but what is mine is mine. Good-bye.
"Michael Brill.
"P.S.—Don't try to find me at the factory. I have left."