but still she went on with him in silence, perhaps because she was accustomed to obey blindly and unquestioning—perhaps, too, because her lips were mute with fear and anxiety.
Below Castle Sonneck, opposite Lorch, about the place where the hamlet of Nieder Rheinbach now stands, there rises a cliff which arches out over the Rhine bank. The Rabbi ascended it with his wife, looked around on every side, and gazed on the stars. Trembling and shivering, as with the pain of death, Beautiful Sara looked at his pale face, which seemed spectre-like in the moon-rays, and seemed to express by turns pain, terror, piety, and rage. But when the Rabbi suddenly snatched from her hands the silver ewer and threw it far away into the Rhine, she could no longer endure her agony of uncertainty, and crying out, "Schadai, full of mercy!" threw herself at his feet, and conjured him to solve the dark enigma.
Unable at first to speak from excitement, the Rabbi moved his lips without uttering a sound, till at last he cried, "Dost thou see the Angel of Death? There below he sweeps over Bacharach. But we have escaped his sword. Praised be God!" And in a voice still trembling with excitement he told her that while he was happily and comfortably singing the Agade he glanced by chance under the table, and saw at his feet the bloody
