of a Synhedrin and the right to try a capital charge had long been

forbidden. But they were face to face with death, and hence
the anachronism had been adopted, and they had fallen back on the custom

of their fathers. So three-and-twenty judges they had appointed,
without usurers, or slave-dealers, or gamblers, or aged men

or childless ones.
The judges had sat in session the same night, and their judgment

had been unanimous. The lot of Jonah had fallen on Israel.
He had sold himself to their masters and enemies, the Moors,

against the hope and interest of his own people; he had driven some
of the sons of his race and nation into exile in distant cities;

he had brought others to the Kasbah, and yet others to death:
he was a man at open enmity with God, and God had given him,

as a mark of His displeasure, a child who was cursed with devils,
a daughter who had been born blind and dumb and deaf,

and was still without sight and speech.
Could the hand of God's anger be more plain if it were printed

in fire upon the sky? Israel was the evil one for whose sin
they suffered this devastating plague. The Lord was rebuking them

for sparing him, even as He had rebuked Saul for sparing the king
and cattle of the Amalekites. Seventeen years and more he had been among

them without being of them, never entering a synagogue,
never observing a fast, never joining in a feast. Not until

their judgment went out against him would God's anger be appeased.
Let them cut him off from the children of his race, and the blessed rain

would fall from heaven, and the thirsty earth would drink it,
and the eggs of the locust would be destroyed. But let them put off

any longer their rightful task and duty before God and before the people,
and their evil time would soon come. Within eight-and-twenty days

the eggs would be hatched, and within eight-and-forty other days
the young locust would have wings. Before the end of those

seventy-and-six days the harvest of wheat and barley would be yellow
to the scythe and ripe for the granary, but the locust would cover

the face of the earth, and there would be no grain to gather.
The scythe would be idle, the granaries would be empty,

the tillers of the ground would come hungry into the markets,
and they themselves that were town-dwellers and tradesmen would be

perishing for bread, both they and their children with them.
Thus in Israel's absence, while he was away at Shawan,

the three-and-twenty judges of the new Synhedrin of Tetuan
had--contrary to Jewish custom--tried and convicted him.

God would not let them perish for this man's life, and neither would
He charge them with his blood.

Nevertheless, judges though they were, they could not kill him.
They could only appeal against him to the Kaid. And what could they say?

That the Lord had sent this plague of locusts in punishment
of Israel's sin? Ben Aboo would laugh in their faces and answer them,

"It is written." That to appease God's wrath it was expedient
that this Jew should die? Convince the Muslim that a Jew

had brought this desolation upon the land of the Shereefs,
and he would arise, and his soldiers with him, and the whole community

of the Jewish people would be destroyed.
The judges had laid their heads together. It was idle to appeal

to Ben Aboo against Israel on any ground of belief. Nay, it was more
than idle, for it was dangerous. There was nothing in common

between his faith and their own. His God was not their God,
save in name only. The one was Allah, great, stern, relentless,

inexorable, not to be moved striding on to an inevitable end,
heedless of man and trampling upon him--though sometimes mocked

with the names of the Compassionate and the Merciful. But the other
was Jehovah, the father of His people Israel, caring for them,

upholding them, guiding the world for them, conquering for them;
but visiting His anger upon them when they fell away from Him.

The three-and-twenty judges in session in the synagogue
up the narrow lane of the Sok el Foki had sat far into the night,

with the light of the oil-lamps gleaming on their perplexed
and ashen faces. Some other ground of appeal against Israel

had to be found, and they could not find it. At length
they had remembered that, by ancient law and custom the trial

of an Israelite, for life or death, must end an hour after sunset.
Also they had been reminded that the day that heard the evidence

in a capital case must not be the same whereon the verdict was pronounced.
So they had broken up and returned home. And, going out at the gate,

they had told the crowds that waited there that judgment had fallen
upon Israel ben Oliel, but that his doom could not be made known

until sunset on the following day.
That time was now come. In eagerness and impatience, in hot blood

and anger, the people had gathered in the Sok three hours after midday.
The Judges had reassembled in the synagogue in the early morning.

They had not broken bread since yesterday, for the day
that condemned a son of Israel to death must be a fast-day to his judges.

As the afternoon wore on, the doors of the synagogue were thrown open.
The sentence was not ready yet, but the: judges in council were near

to their decision. At the open door the reader of the synagogue
had stationed himself, holding a flag in his hand. Under the gate

of the Mellah a second messenger was standing, so placed
that he could see the movement of the flag. If the flag fell,

the sentence would be "death," and the man under the gate would carry
the tidings to the people gathered in the market-place.

Then the three-and-twenty judges would come in procession and tell
what steps had been taken that the doom pronounced might be carried

into effect.
Amid all their loud uproar, and notwithstanding the wild anger

which seemed to consume them, the people turned at intervals
of a few minutes to glance back towards the Mellah gate.

If the angels were looking down, surely it was a pitiful sight--
these children of Zion in a strange land, where they were held as dogs

and vermin and human scavengers to the Muslim; thinking and speaking
and acting as their fathers had done any time for five thousand years

before; again judging it expedient that one man should die
rather than the whole people be brought to destruction;

again probing their crafty heads, if not their hearts,
for an artifice whereby their scapegoat might be killed by the hand

of their enemy; children indeed, for all that some of their heads
were bald, and some of their beards were grizzled, and some

of their faces were wrinkled and hard and fierce; little children
of God writhing in the grip of their great trouble

Such was the scene to which Naomi had come, and such had been the doings
of the town since the hour when her father left her. What hand

had led her? What power had taught her? Was it merely
that her far-reaching ears had heard the tumult? Had some unknown sense,

groping in darkness, filled her with a vague terror, too indefinite
to be called a thought, of great and impending evil? Or was it

some other influence, some higher leading? Was it that the Lord was
in His heaven that night as always, and that when the two black bondwomen

in their helpless fear were following the blind maiden
through the darkening streets she in her turn was following God?

When Fatimah and Habeebah saw what it was to which Naomi had led them,
though they were sorelyconcerned at it, yet they were relieved as well,

and put by the worst of the fears with which her strange behaviour
had infected them. And remembering that she was the daughter of Israel,

and they were his servants, and neither thinking themselves safe
from danger if they stayed any longer where his name was bandied about

as a reproach, nor fully knowing how many of the curses that were
heaped upon him found a way to Naomi's mind, they were for turning again

and going back to the house.
"Come," said Habeebah; "let us go--we are not safe."

"Yes," said Fatimah; "let us take the poor child back."
"Come along, then," said Habeebah, and she laid hold of Naomi's hand.