Meantime the couple clinked chocolate cups, and smiled into each other's eyes.
'The good-for-nothing!' thought Elias hotly. 'She will make the same eyes at the next man.'
And he went on gorging her, every speculative 'stuffed monkey' increasing his nervous tension. Her white teeth, biting recklessly into the cake, made him itch to slap her rosy cheek. Confectionery palled at last, and Fanny led the way out. Elias followed, chattering with feverish gaiety. Gradually he drew up even with her.
They turned down the deserted Fishmonger's Alley, lit by one dull gas-lamp. Elias's limbs began to tremble with the excitement of the critical moment. He felt like a footpad. Hither and thither he peered--nobody was about. But--was he on the right side of her? 'The right is the left,' he told himself, trying to smile, but his pulses thumped, and in the tumult of heart and brain he was not sure he knew her right hand from her left. Fortunately he caught the glitter of the diamond in the gloom, and instinctively his robber hand closed upon it.
But as he felt the warm responsive clasp of those soft fingers, that ancient delicious thrill pierced every vein. Fool that he had been to doubt that dear hand! And it was wearing his ring still--she could not part with it! O blundering male ingrate!
'My treasure! My angel!' he murmured ecstatically.
The little poet sat in the East-side café looking six feet high. Melchitsedek Pinchas--by dint of a five-pound note from Sir Asher Aaronsberg in acknowledgement of the dedication to him of the poet's 'Songs of Zion'--had carried his genius to the great new Jewry across the Atlantic. He had arrived in New York only that very March, and already a crowd of votaries hung upon his lips and paid for all that entered them. Again had the saying been verified that a prophet is nowhere without honour save in his own country. The play that had vainly plucked at the stage-doors of the Yiddish Theatres of Europe had already been accepted by the leading Yiddish theatre of New York. At least there were several Yiddish Theatres, each claiming this supreme position, but the poet felt that the production of his play at Goldwater's Theatre settled the question among them.