Srul plunged into an eager recapitulation of the agent's assurances. And before the eyes of both the marriage-canopy reared itself splendid in the Land of Promise, and the figure of Biela flitted, crowned with the bridal wreath.
"But what will become of your mother?" Leah asked.
Srul's soap-bubbles collapsed. He had forgotten for the moment that he had a mother.
"She might come to live with us," Leah hastened to suggest, seeing his o'erclouded face.
"Ah, no, that would be too much of a burden. And Tsirrélé, too, is growing up."
"Tsirrélé eats quite as much now as she will in ten years' time," said Leah, laughing, as she thought fondly of her dear, beautiful little one, her gay whimsies and odd caprices.
"And my mother does not eat very much," said Srul, wavering.
In this way Srul became a "piece," and was dumped down in the Land of Promise.
IV
To the four females left behind—odd fragments of two families thrown into an odder one—the movements of the particular piece, Srul, were the chief interest of existence. The life in the three-roomed wooden cottage soon fell into a routine, Leah going daily to the tropical factory, Biela doing the housework and dreaming of her lover, little Tsirrélé frisking about and chattering like the squirrel she was, and Srul's mother dozing and criticising and yearning for her lost son and her unborn grandchildren. By the time Srul's first letter, with its exciting pictorial stamp, arrived from the Land of Promise, the household seemed to have been established on this basis from time immemorial.