“Why not pawn the feather bed your mother left you?” She jumped at the thought.

“What? Have you no heart? No feelings? Pawn the only one thing left from your dead mother?

“Why not? Nothing is too dear for him. If your mother could stand up from her grave, she’d cut herself in pieces, she’d tear the sun and stars out from the sky to make you beautiful for him.”

Late one evening Zaretsky sat in his pawnshop, absorbed in counting the money of his day’s sales, when Shenah Pessah, with a shawl over her head and a huge bundle over her shoulder, edged her way hesitantly into the store. Laying her sacrifice down on the counter, she stood dumbly and nervously fingered the fringes of her shawl.

The pawnbroker lifted his miserly face from the cash-box and shot a quick glance at the girl’s trembling figure.

“Nu?” said Zaretsky, in his cracked voice, cutting the twine from the bundle and unfolding a feather bed. His appraising hand felt that it was of the finest down. “How much ask you for it?”

The fiendish gleam of his shrewd eyes paralyzed her with terror. A lump came in her throat and she wavered speechless.

“I’ll give you five dollars,” said Zaretsky.

“Five dollars?” gasped Shenah Pessah. Her hands rushed back anxiously to the feather bed and her fingers clung to it as if it were a living thing. She gazed panic-stricken at the gloomy interior of the pawnshop with its tawdry jewels in the cases; the stacks of second-hand clothing hanging overhead, back to the grisly face of the pawnbroker. The weird tickings that came from the cheap clocks on the shelves behind Zaretsky, seemed to her like the smothered heart-beats of people who like herself had been driven to barter their last precious belongings for a few dollars.

“Is it for yourself that you come?” he asked, strangely stirred by the mute anguish in the girl’s eyes. This morgue of dead belongings had taken its toll of many a pitiful victim of want. But never before had Zaretsky been so affected. People bargained and rebelled and struggled with him on his own plane. But the dumb helplessness of this girl and her coming to him at such a late hour touched the man’s heart.

“Is it for yourself?” he repeated, in a softened tone.

The new note of feeling in his voice made her look up. The 

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