As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery, clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the 'Yvonne Rupert cigar,' he wondered dully—after the first flush of joy at getting a job after weeks of hunger—at the strange fate that had again brought him into connection, however remote, with stageland. For even to Elkan Mandle, with his Ghetto purview, Yvonne Rupert's fame, both as a 'Parisian' star and the queen of American advertisers, had penetrated. Ever since she had summoned a Jewish florist for not paying her for the hundred and eleven bouquets with which a single week's engagement in vaudeville had enabled her to supply him, the journals had continued to paragraph her amusing, self-puffing adventures.

Not that there was much similarity between the New York star and his little actress of the humble Yiddish Theatre in London, save for that aureole of fluffy hair, which belonged rather to the genus than the individual. But as the great Yvonne's highly-coloured charms went on repeating themselves from every box-cover he manipulated (at seventy-five cents [294]a hundred), the face of his own Gittel grew more and more vivid, till at last the whole splendid, shameful past began to rise up from its desolate tomb.

He even lived through that prologue in the Ghetto garret, when, as benevolent master-tailor receiving the highest class work from S. Cohn's in the Holloway Road, he was called upstairs to assist the penniless Polish immigrants.

There she sat, the witching she-devil, perched on the rickety table just contributed to the home, a piquant, dark-eyed, yet golden-haired, mite of eleven, calm and comparatively spruce amid the wailing litter of............