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banker in Strasbourg to send you the same every month for as long as either one of you lives. And this bag here—this is a donation to the synagogue. Make it for me in Hannah’s memory.”
    The old man and the aging woman were overawed. There was something in their speechless awe, in the wetness of their eyes, that made David ashamed. That any human being should have to be so grateful to another was wrong somehow. It was humiliating.
    “And don’t worry about the children. They will have perfect care in my home. My wife Emma is the kindest woman. She is looking forward to them.”
    Aunt Dinah wiped her eyes. “David is too daring for his own good, too bold and careless. Headstrong. When he gets a thought in his head you can’t dig it out. So stubborn. But such a good boy all the same.” David looked at her in astonishment. Never, never once that he could remember had she called him a good boy.
    “Yes, he knows what the world should be and thinks he can change it. When you learn not to say the first thing that comes to mind, David, it will be better for you,” Dinah concluded.
    The old man had something to add. “Last year hegot us into trouble with the neighbors. The father over there was beating his young son for stealing potatoes, and David shouted at the man: ‘That’s no way to train a child!’ he told him. ‘You ought to know better! The Torah instructs you to teach a child, not beat him.’ Imagine! A boy just past Bar Mitzvah telling a grown man how to rear his son! The man was angry, I can tell you that.”
    “But David was right,” Miriam remarked suddenly.
    “His shadow,” Dinah said, embracing the child. “She is her brother’s shadow. Anything he does is right in her eyes. Isn’t it, Miriam?”
    Ferdinand laughed. “Well, I can see my life will be more interesting from now on, anyway.”
    Now the moment had come, the hardest of all, the final moment when there is nothing more to say than a farewell, which must be said with some restraint and dignity lest the last memory be of total grief. There must be a severance, but not a ripping.
    David took Dinah’s hand and then the grandfather’s, kissed them, and without speaking turned away. Moved by the boy’s intuition, for in another moment the old man would have broken down in tears, Ferdinand took those same hands in his. Then with his arms upon the shoulders of his children, aware that the two left behind were closely watching, and that the sight of this affection would be a consolation to them, he led them down the alley to the yard of the Golden Bear, where the coach was already waiting to take them on the first leg of the long journey home.

2
    Five weeks out of Le Havre the brig
Mirabelle,
carrying cotton goods, wine, and passengers, had left the iron-gray North Atlantic behind, had taken on fresh food and water in the Azores, and was now moving southwestward into summer. Between blue and blue it sailed, the dome of sky merging with the indigo swell of the sea. Turquoise and lapis lazuli and azure, the waves raced with the ship. Where the wake followed, splitting the surface of the water at the stern, the blue was so pale as to quiver into silver. Caught by the trade winds the tall sails whipped and the ship gathered more speed; its festive pennants crackled and the carved, aristocratic lady on the prow stretched her long neck toward the western hemisphere as if she, too, were impatient to reach it.
    For Miriam, who had never traveled more than a few kilometers between identical villages in a horse and cart, who had never seen anything more impressive than the rather mediocre summer residence of the Graf von Weisshausen—and that only glimpsed from a distant road at the end of a long cypress allée—who had never seen anything more exotic than a traveling coach such as the one in which her father had arrived, the voyage was miraculous and would have been an end in itself had it led nowhere at all.For David, who had traveled in books