'Have you become a Christian, my son?' demanded the old man; 'or perhaps this is not the Sabbath-day?'
'I adhere to the doctrines of my forefathers,' replied his son, 'in what I consider to be of consequence, and in what is applicable to the age in which we live, and to the ideas of what is holy and unholy that my reason and my senses can acknowledge. I wish my father would do the same, and not be scandalized at what is really quite innocent.'
'My father-in-law must try to put up with our fare,' said the mistress of the house, handing him, with thoughtless indifference, a plate of roast pork. 'Our house is quite in disorder to-day,' she added, by way of apology, when he silently handed her back the plate, 'and I really did not bethink me of our guest; but I shall have something else another time, when I am accustomed to remember what he will not eat.'
A gloomy silence then followed at table, and Isaac cast a reproachful look at his wife, which she did not omit to notice. The old man made a movement as if he were about to rise, but at that moment his eye fell on Benjamina; he remained silent and reseated himself. What Benjamina read, however, in her grandfather's countenance, drew unbidden tears to her beautiful eyes--tears which she quickly brushed away, while in her embarrassment she, unwittingly, broke up her bread into small crumbs on the tablecloth. For this act of extravagance she received a sharp reprimand from her aunt, with a rude reminder that these were not times to waste bread, and that 'those who had nothing of their own should think themselves lucky to get anything to put in their mouths.'
'Wife!' whispered Isaac, to his better half, as they rose from table, 'that was not according to our agreement.'
When old Philip Moses was alone with his son afterwards, he looked long and earnestly at him, and then said, in a dejected tone of voice:
'My son, speak out the truth freely--the grey-haired, antiquated Jew is an unbidden guest; you are ashamed to close your doors against him, but not to give him wormwood in his cup of welcome; and my poor Benjamina is looked on as a mendicant here, to whom you have not many crumbs of bread to spare.'
'How so--my father?' stammered Isaac. 'If my wife--forgive her!--I myself remarked a degree of thoughtlessness in her, which pained me.'