CHAPTER IV.
THE REDEMPTION OF THE SON AND THE DAUGHTER.
Malka did not have long to wait for her liege lord.

He was a fresh-colored young man of thirty, rather good-looking, with side whiskers, keen, eager glance, and an air of perpetually doing business.
Though a native of Germany, he spoke English as well as many Lane Jews, whose comparative impiety was a certificate of British birth.

Michael Birnbaum was a great man in the local little synagogue if only one of the crowd at "Duke's Plaizer." He had been successively _Gabbai_ and _Parnass_, or treasurer and president, and had presented the plush curtain, with its mystical decoration of intersecting triangles, woven in silk, that hung before the Ark in which the scrolls of the Law were kept.

He was the very antithesis of Moses Ansell.

His energy was restless.