And as they spoke, an undercurrent of pensive thought was flowing in the old scholar’s soul and his tones grew tenderer and tenderer.  The echoes of Ebenezer’s effusive speech were in his ears and the artificial notes rang strangely genuine.  All round him sat happy fathers of happy children, men who warmed their hands at the home-fire of life, men who lived while he was thinking.  Yet he, too, had had his chance far back in the dim and dusty years, his chance of love and money with it.  He had let it slip away for poverty and learning, and only six men in Europe cared whether he lived or died.  The sense of his own loneliness smote him with a sudden aching desolation.  His gaze grew humid; the face of the young student was covered with a veil of mist and seemed to shine with the radiance of an unstained soul.  If he had been as other men he might have had such a son.  At this moment Gabriel Hamburg was speaking of paragoge in Hebrew grammar, but his voice faltered and in imagination he was laying hands of paternal benediction on Joseph Strelitski’s head.  Swayed by an overmastering impulse he burst out at last.

“An idea strikes me!”

Strelitski looked up in silent interrogation at the old man’s agitated face.

“You live by yourself.  I live by myself.  We are both students.  Why should we not live together as students, too?”

A swift wave of surprise traversed Strelitski’s face, and his eyes grew soft.  For an instant the one solitary soul visibly yearned towards the other; he hesitated.

“Do not think I am too old,” said the great scholar, trembling all over.  “I know it is the young who chum together, but still I am a student.  And you shall see how lively and cheerful I will be.”  He forced a smile that hovered on tears.  “We shall be two rackety young students, every night raising a thousand devils. Gaudeamus igitur.”  He began to hum in his cracked hoarse voice the Burschen-lied of his early days at the Berlin Gymnasium.

But Strelitski’s face had grown dusky with a gradual flush and a deepening gloom; his black eyebrows were knit and his lips set together and his eyes full of sullen ire.  He suspected a snare to assist him.

He shook his head.  “Thank you,” he said slowly.  “But I prefer to live alone.”

And he turned and spoke to the astonished Bessie, and so the two strange lonely vessels that had hailed each other across the darkness drifted away and apart for ever in the waste of waters.

But Jonathan Sugarman’s eye was on more tragic episodes.  Gradually the plates emptied, for the guests openly followed up the more substantial elements of the repast by dessert, more devastating even than the rear manoeuvres.  At last there was nothing but an aching china blank.  The men looked round the table for something else to “nash,” but everywhere was the same depressing desolation.  Only in the centre of the table towered in awful intact