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After some hesitation I made a dash for one of these chairs, and the next minute I was within three or four feet from Matilda, but with an excited crowd between us. Everybody wanted to shake hands with the heroes. The jam and scramble were so great that Doctor Gorsky, Yeffim, and Matilda had to extricate themselves and to escape into the spacious committee-room in the rear of the platform
Matilda was flanked by two men, both with full beards, one fair and the other rather dark. The one of the fair complexion and beard was Yeffim, although I recognized him by his resemblance to Matilda and more especially to her father, rather than by his image of twenty-one years ago.
Talmud students were expected to be the shyest creatures under the sun. On this occasion I certainly was The other children entered the room. They were dressing themselves, eating and studying their Gentile lessons all at once. Matilda had a mild altercation with Yeffim, her eighteen-year-old brother, ordered breakfast for herself, and seemed to have forgotten my existence.
Some minutes later I stood by her side in that room, amid a cluster of revolutionists, her husband and Yeffim being each the center of another crowd in the same room "I beg your pardon," I began, with a sheepish smile. "Do you know me." Her glittering brown eyes fixed me with a curious look. "My name is David Levinsky," I added.
He could furnish me no information about Reb Sender, of whom he had never heard before; he knew of the Minsker family, of course, and he told me that Shiphrah, Matilda's mother, was dead; that Yeffim, Matilda's brother, had been sent to Siberia some three years before for complicity in the revolutionary movement, and that Matilda herself had had a hair-breadth escape from arrest and was living in Switzerland
From time to time some distinguished revolutionist would be sent to America for subscriptions to the cause. This was the mission of Doctor Gorsky and Yeffim. They were here, not as immigrants, but merely to raise funds for the movement at home As for Matilda, it appeared that Doctor Gorsky was her husband.
He wrote to Antomir, and a few weeks later he brought me the sad information that Reb Sender had been dead for several years, and that his wife had married again ONE day in November less than six months after I had learned of Yeffim Minsker's arrest and of Matilda's escape, as I was making the rounds of my several departments, little Mirmelstein accosted me timidly
"Yeffim Minsker and his sister are here," he said, with the smile of one breaking an interesting surprise I paused, flushing. I feigned indifference and preoccupation, but the next moment I cast off all pretense "Are they really?" I asked
I asked myself whether I was jealous of him, and the question seemed so incongruous, so remote. He made a good impression on me. I warmed to him He was followed by Yeffim, and the scene of wild enthusiasm was repeated When Minsker had finished the chairman declared the meeting closed. There was a rush for the platform.
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