Canadian backwoods, in South American savannahs:  the Australian Jews on the sheep-farms and the gold-fields and in the mushroom cities; the Jews of Asia in their reeking quarters begirt by barbarian populations.  The shadow of a large mysterious destiny seemed to hang over these poor superstitious zealots, whose lives she knew so well in all their everyday prose, and to invest the unconscious shunning sons of the Ghetto with something of tragic grandeur.  The gray dusk palpitated with floating shapes of prophets and martyrs, scholars and sages and poets, full of a yearning love and pity, lifting hands of benediction.  By what great high-roads and queer by-ways of history had they travelled hither, these wandering Jews, “sated with contempt,” these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these human paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energizing in every field of activity, omnipresent like sonic great natural force, indestructible and almost inconvertible, surviving—­with the incurable optimism that overlay all their poetic sadness—­Babylon and Carthage, Greece and Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the Inquisition, illusive of all baits, unshaken by all persecutions—­at once the greatest and meanest of races?  Had the Jew come so far only to break down at last, sinking in morasses of modern doubt, and irresistibly dragging down with him the Christian and the Moslem; or was he yet fated to outlast them both, in continuous testimony to a hand moulding incomprehensibly the life of humanity?  Would Israel develop into the sacred phalanx, the nobler brotherhood that Raphael Leon had dreamed of, or would the race that had first proclaimed—­through Moses for the ancient world, through Spinoza for the modern—­

“One God, one Law, one Element,”

become, in the larger, wilder dream of the Russian idealist, the main factor in

            “One far-off divine event
    To which the whole Creation moves”?

The roar dwindled to a solemn silence, as though in answer to her questionings.  Then the ram’s horn shrilled—­a stern long-drawn-out note, that rose at last into a mighty peal of sacred jubilation.  The Atonement was complete.

The crowd bore Esther downstairs and into the blank indifferent street.  But the long exhausting fast, the fetid atmosphere, the strain upon her emotions, had overtaxed her beyond endurance.  Up to now the frenzy of the service had sustained her, but as she stepped across the threshold on to the pavement she staggered and fell.  One of the men pouring out from the lower synagogue caught her in his arms.  It was Strelitski.

* * * * *

A group of three stood on the saloon deck of an outward-bound steamer.  Raphael Leon was bidding farewell to the man he reverenced without discipleship, and the woman he loved without blindness.