She hustled the child into the Square and banged the door upon her, and Esther went about her mammoth marketing half-dazed, with an undercurrent of happiness, vaguely apologetic towards her father and his Providence.
Malka stooped down, picked up the clothes-brush from under the side-table, and strode silently and diagonally across the Square.
There was a moment's dread silence. The thunderbolt had fallen. The festival felicity of two households trembled in the balance. Michael muttered impatiently and went out on his wife's track.
"He's an awful fool," said Ephraim. "I should make her pay for her tantrums."
The card party broke up in confusion. David Brandon took his leave and strolled about aimlessly under the stars, his soul blissful with the sense of a good deed that had only superficially miscarried. His feet took him to Hannah's house. All the windows were lit up. His heart began to ache at the thought that his bright, radiant girl was beyond that doorstep he had never crossed.
He pictured the love-light in her eyes; for surely she was dreaming of him, as he of her. He took out his watch--the time was twenty to nine. After all, would it be so outrageous to call? He went away twice. The third time, defying the _convenances_, he knocked at the door, his heart beating almost as loudly.
The little servant girl who opened the door for him looked relieved by the sight of him, for it might have been the Rebbitzin returning from the Lane with heaps of supplies and an accumulation of ill-humor. She showed him into the study, and in a few moments Hannah hurried in with a big apron and a general flavor of the kitchen.
"How dare you come to-night?" she began, but the sentence died on her lips.
"How hot your face is," he said, dinting the flesh fondly with his finger, "I see my little girl is glad to have me back."
"It's not that. It's the fire. I'm frying fish for _Yomtov_," she said, with a happy laugh.
"And yet you say you're not a good Jewess," he laughed back.
"You had no right to come and catch me like this," she pouted. "All greasy and dishevelled. I'm not made up to receive visitors."
"Call me a visitor?" he grumbled. "Judging by your appearance, I should say you were always made up. Why, you're perfectly radiant."