but
searching and melting, like the thoughts of what has been. That is the way old
people like me feel a beautiful voice.«
    But Mrs. Meyrick did not enter into particulars which would have required
her to say that Amy and Mab, who had accompanied Mirah to the synagogue, found
the Jewish faith less reconcilable with their wishes in her case than in that of
Scott's Rebecca. They kept silence out of delicacy to Mirah, with whom her
religion was too tender a subject to be touched lightly; but after a while Amy,
who was much of a practical reformer, could not restrain a question.
    »Excuse me, Mirah, but does it seem quite right to you that the women should
sit behind rails in a gallery apart?«
    »Yes, I never thought of anything else,« said Mirah, with mild surprise.
    »And you like better to see the men with their hats on?« said Mab,
cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.
    »Oh yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back to me
the same feelings - the feelings I would not part with for anything else in the
world.«
    After this, any criticism, whether of doctrine or of practice, would have
seemed to these generous little people an inhospitable cruelty. Mirah's religion
was of one fibre with her affections, and had never presented itself to her as a
set of propositions.
    »She says herself she is a very bad Jewess, and does not half know her
people's religion,« said Amy, when Mirah was gone to bed. »Perhaps it would
gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianity like the rest
of the world, if she got to love us very much, and never found her mother. It is
so strange to be of the Jews' religion now.«
    »Oh, oh, oh!« cried Mab. »I wish I were not such a hideous Christian. How
can an ugly Christian, who is always dropping her work, convert a beautiful
Jewess, who has not a fault?«
    »It may be wicked of me,« said shrewd Kate, »but I cannot help wishing that
her mother may not be found. There might be something unpleasant.«
    »I don't think it, my dear,« said Mrs. Meyrick. »I believe Mirah is cut out
after the pattern of her mother. And what a joy it would be to her to have such
a daughter brought back again! But a mother's feelings