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He received two of the roundabout proposals which etiquette demands, and began to gather a dowry for Leah and to recall extraordinary outstanding securities to that end. But, before these things were accomplished, his sons and his troubles returned upon him. With renewed energy, stimulated imagination, and enriched profanity, “them Yonowsky devils” came home, and their reign of mischief set in afresh.

They had always been unruly; they were utterly unmanageable now. Daily was Leah summoned to the big red school-house by the long-suffering Miss Bailey, and nightly was Mr. Yonowsky forced to cancel engagements at club or synagogue and to stay at home to “explanation them boys” to outraged neighbours.

Aaron could still control them, but he was never brought upstairs now. How could Leah expect him to enjoy conversations carried on amid the yells of Algernon and Percival in freedom, or their shrieks in durance?

The twins came home one noontime full of gossip and excitement. They clamoured over their cabbage soup that a classmate of theirs, one Isidore Belchatosky, had “a sickness–a taking sickness, what he took from off his sister Sadie.”

“Is it a bad sickness?” asked the father.

“Somethin’ fierce!” Percival assured him. “Pimples stands on his face, und he says he’s got ’em everywheres, but I guess maybe he lies. He says it’s a chicken sickness what he has. Mit pimples everywheres!”

“You don’t know no names from sicknesses,” Algernon broke in contemptuously. “It ain’t the chicken sickness. It’s the chicken puffs.”

“Where is his house?” asked Leah eagerly. And she joyously despatched the twins with kind inquiries and proffers to sit with the sufferer; for had not the prophesying gentleman explained that there was no surer way of attaining to hospital tickets than by speech and contact with one who had already “arrived”? And Algernon and Percival, spurred on by the allurement of the “pimples everywheres,” pressed past all barriers and outposts until they feasted their eyes upon the neatly spotted Izzie, who proudly proved his boast of the “everywheres” and the exceeding puffiness of the chicken puffs.

Two weeks later the little emissaries of love were in sorry case. The “pimples everywheres” appeared, the ambulance reappeared, the twins disappeared. The cleaning and polishing were resumed, Aaron invited to supper, Mr. Yonowsky pledged to deliver a lecture on “The Southern Negro and the Ballot,” and a stew of the strongest elements set to simmer on the stove.

Leah had learned the path to freedom and trod it with a light heart. Algernon and Percival enjoyed a long succession of diseases, contagious and infectious, and each attack meant a holiday of varying but always of considerable length. Under ordinary conditions Leah might have been forced to nurse her brothers through their less serious disorders, but there was a butcher shop on the ground floor of the Yonowsky tenement, and the by-laws of the Board of Health decreed that, such being the case, the children should be removed for nearly all the ills to which young and ill-nourished flesh is heir.

“Them Yonowsky devils” became only visitors to their native block, but since they returned after each retirement more unruly and outrageous, they were not deeply mourned. Only the butcher objected, because his store was occasionally quarantined when Leah had achieved some very virulent excuse for summoning the ambulance and shipping her responsibilities. Mr. Yonowsky was puzzled but grateful, and Aaron was grateful too.

Month after month went by and the twins had exhausted the lists of the lecturer and had enjoyed several other ailments, when Leah and her father went to bring them home from their typhoid-fever holiday.

“You’ve been having a hard time with these boys,” the man at the desk said kindly. “The worst luck I ever knew in the many years I’ve been here. But they’re all right now. They’ve had everything on the list except water on the brain and elephantiasis, and they can’t get them.”

“But some what they had they could some more get,” Leah suggested in the English she so rarely used.

“I think not,” the official answered cheeringly. “They hardly ever do. No, I guess you’ll be able to keep them at home now. Good luck to you!”

But it was bad luck, the worst of luck. Mr. Yonowsky’s public spirit died within his breast; Leah’s coquetry vanished before a future unrelieved by visits from the black and friendly ambulance, and when Aaron climbed the well-known stairs that evening he heard, while he was yet two floors short of his destination, the shrieks of the twins, the smashing of crockery, and the grumbling of the neighbours. Suddenly a little figure darted upon him and Leah was in his arms.

“Aaron,” she sobbed. “Oh, Aaron, mine heart it breaks. There ain’t no more taking sicknesses in all the world. So says the gentleman.”

“My golden one,” said Aaron, who was a bit of a philosopher; “all good things come to an end except only Love. And the twins have had taking sicknesses in great and unheard-of numbers.”

“But now they are more than ever bad. I can do nothing with them and I am afraid of them. In hospitals, where one is very happy, one grows very big, and the twins are no longer little boys.”

“If you marry me–” Aaron began.

“You will love me always?”

“Yea, mine gold.”

“And for me you will boss them twins?”

“Yea, verily, for thee I will boss the twins.”

And the betrothal of Leah Yonowsky to Aaron Kastrinsky was signed and sealed immediately.