Bethulah by Israel Zangwill

I got to Warsaw and back in the time at my disposal, but not all the freshness and variety of my experiences could banish the thought of Bethulah. There were days when I could absorb myself in the passing panorama, but I felt always, so to speak, in the ante-chamber of the great moment of our third and decisive meeting.

And with every shortening day of December that moment approached. Yet I all but missed it when it came. A snowfall I might easily have foreseen retarded my journey at the eleventh hour, but my faithful mare ploughed her way through the white morasses. As she munched her mid-day corn in that quaint Christian village that neighboured Zloczszol, and in which I had agreed to stable her, it was borne in on me for the first time that the eve of Chanukah was likewise Christmas eve. I wondered vaguely if there was any occult significance in the coincidence or in the _Chassidic_ choice of dates; but it was too late now to protest, and loading my pistol against foul play, I hurried to the rendezvous.