As though conscious that all eyes were upon him, Ascher showed himself most punctilious in the discharge of even the minutest of communal duties which devolved upon him as a denizen of the Ghetto, and his habits of life were almost ostentatiously regular and decorous. His business had prospered, and Gudule had borne him a son.
“Well, Gudule, my child,” the farmer asked his daughter on the day when his grandson was received into the covenant of Abraham,—“well, Gudule, was the letter right?”
“What letter?” asked Gudule.
“That in which your husband was called a gambler.”
“And can you still give a thought to such a letter?” was Gudule's significant reply.
Three years later, Gudule's father came to visit her. This time she showed him his second grandchild, her little Viola. He kissed the children, and round little Viola's neck clasped three rows of pearls, “that the child may know it had a grandfather once.”
“And where are your pearls, Gudule?” he asked, “those left you by your mother,—may she rest in peace! She always set such store by them.”
“Those, father?” Gudule replied, turning pale; “oh, my husband has taken them to a goldsmith in Prague. They require a new clasp.”
“I see,” remarked her father. Notwithstanding his limited powers of observation, it did not escape the old man's eyes that Gudule looked alarmingly wan and emaciated. He saw it, and it grieved his very soul. He said nothing however: only, when leaving, and after he had kissed the Mezuza * he said to Gudule (who, with little Viola in her arms, went with him to the door), in a voice quivering with suppressed emotion: “Gudule, my child, the pearl necklet which I have given your little Viola has a clasp strong enough to last a hundred years... you need never, therefore, give it to your husband to have a new clasp made for it.”