"Emanuel Lefkovitch that you ran away with."
"Mother, are you mad? I have never seen him. I am married."
"Married!" gasped Flutter-Duck ecstatically. Then a new dread rose to her mind. "To a Christian?"
"Me marry a Christian! The idea!"
Flutter-Duck fell a-sobbing on the fine lady's fur jacket. "And you never ran away with Lefkovitch?"
"Me take another woman's leavings? Well, upon my word!"
"Oh," sobbed Flutter-Duck. "Oh, if your father could only have lived to know the truth!"
Rachel's remorse became heartrending. "Is father dead?" she murmured with white lips. After awhile she drew her mother out of the babel, and giving her the bag to carry to save appearances, she walked slowly towards Liverpool Street, and took train with her for her pretty little cottage near Epping Forest.
Rachel's story was as simple as her mother's. After the showing up of Emanuel's duplicity, home had no longer the least attraction for her. Her nascent love for the migratory husband changed to a loathing that embraced the whole Ghetto in which such things were possible. Weary of Flutter-Duck's follies, indifferent to her father, she had long meditated joining her West-end girl-friend in the fur establishment in Regent Street, but the blow precipitated matters. She felt she could not remain a night more under her mother's roof, and her father's clumsy comment was but salt on her wound. Her heart was hard against both; month after month passed before her passionate, sullen nature would let her dwell on the thought of their trouble, and even then she felt that the motive of her flight was so plain that they would feel only remorse, not anxiety. They knew she could always earn her living, just as she knew they could always earn theirs. Living "in," and going out but rarely, and then in the fashionable districts, she never met any drift from the Ghetto, and the busy life of the populous establishment soon effaced the old, which faded to a forgotten dream. One day the chief provincial traveller of the house saw her, fell in love, married her, and took her about the country for six months. He was coming back to her that very evening for the New Year. She had gone back to the Ghetto that day to buy New Year honey, and, softened by time and happiness, rather hoped to stumble across her mother in the market-place, and so save the submission of a call. She never dreamed of death and poverty. She would not blame herself for her father's death—he had always been consumptive—but since death was come at last, it was lucky she could offer her mother a home. Her husband would be delighted to find a companion for his wife during his country rounds.
"So you see, mother, everything is for the best."