as she spoke and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed

and laughed again with a heart of glee.
Israel looked on for some moments at this sweet picture, and,

for all his sense of the dangers of Naomi's artless joy in her own beauty,
he could not find it in his heart to check her. He had borne too long

the pain and shame of one who was father of an afflicted child
to deny himself this choking rapture of her recovery. "Live on

like a child always, little one," he thought; "be a child
as long as you can, be a child for ever, my dove, my darling!

Never did the world suffer it that I myself should be a child at all."
The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly

some new fashion of charming strangeness. All lovely things
on the earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds

and the flowers. Also she would lie down in the grass and rest
like a lamb, with as little shame and with a grace as sweet.

Not yet had the great mystery dawned that drops on a girl
like an unseenmantle out of the sky, and when it has covered her

she is a child no more. Naomi was a child still. Nay, she was a child
a second time, for while she had been blind she had seemed

for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation
of her infirmity and isolation. Now she was a weak, patient,

blind maiden no longer, but a reckless spirit of joy once again,
a restless gleam of human sunlightgatheringsunshine into

her father's house.
It was fit and beautiful that she who had lived so long without

the better part of the gifts of God should enjoy some of them at length
in rare perfection. Her sight was strong and her hearing was keen,

but voice was the gift which she had in abundance. So sweet, so full,
so deep, so soft a voice as Naomi's came to be, Israel thought

he had never heard before. Ruth's voice? Yes, but fraught
with inspiration, replete with sparkling life, and passionate

with the notes of a joyous heart. All day long Naomi used it.
She sang as she rose in the morning, and was still singing

when she lay down at night. Wherever people came upon her,
they came first upon the sound of her voice. The farmers heard it

across the fields, and sometimes Israel heard it from over the hill
by their hut. Often she seemed to them like a bird that is hidden

in a tree, and only known to be there by the outbursts of its song.
Fatimah's ditties were still her delight. Some of them fell strangely

from her pure lips, so nearly did they border on the dangerous.
But her favourite song was still her mother's:--

Oh, come and claim thine own,
Oh, come and take thy throne,

Reign ever and alone
Reign glorious, golden Love.

Into these words, as her voice ripened, she seemed to pour
a deeper fervour. She was as innocent as a child of their meaning,

but it was almost as if she were fulfilling in some way a law
of her nature as a maid and drifting blindly towards the dawn of Love.

Never did she think of Love, but it was just as if Love were always
thinking of her; it was even as if the spirit of Love were hovering

over her constantly, and she were walking in the way of its
outstretched wings.

Israel saw this, and it set him to chasing day-dreams that were like
the drawing up of a curtain. A beautiful phantom of Naomi's future

would rise up before him. Love had come to her. The great mystery!
the rapture, the blissful wonder, the dear, secret, delicious

palpitating joy. He knew it must come some day--perhaps to day,
perhaps to-morrow. And when it came it would be like a sixth sense.

In quieter moments--generally at night, when he would take a candle
and look at her where she lay asleep--Israel would carry his dreams

into Naomi's future one stage farther, and see her in the first dawn
of young motherhood. Her delicate face of pink an cream;

her glance of pride and joy and yearning, an then the thrill
of the little spreading red fingers fastening on her white bosom--oh,

what a glimpse was there revealed to him!
But struggle as he would to find pleasure in these phantoms,

he could not help but feel pain from them also. They had a perilous
fascination for him, but he grudged them to Naomi. He thought

he could have given his immortal soul to her, but these shadows
he could not give. That was his poor tribute to human selfishness;

his last tender, jealousfrailty as a father. He dreaded the coming
of that time when another--some other yet unseen--should come before him,

and he should lose the daughter that was now his own.
Sometimes the memory of their old troubles in Tetuan seemed to cross

like a thundercloud the azure of Naomi's sky, but at the next hour
it was gone. The world was too full of marvels for any enduring sense

but wonder. Once she awoke from sleep in terror, and told Israel
of something which she believed to have happened to her in the night.

She had been carried away from him--she could not say when--and she knew
no more until she found herself in a great patio, paved and wailed

with tiles. Men were standing together there in red peaked caps
and flowing white kaftans. And before them all was one old man

in garments that were of the colour of the afternoon sun, with sleeves
like the mouths of bells, a curling silver knife at his waistband,

and little leather bags hung by yellow cords about his neck.
Beside this man there was a woman of a laughing cruel face;

and she herself, Naomi--alone her father being nowhere near--stood
in the midst with all eyes upon her. What happened next she did not know,

for blank darkness fell upon everything, and in that interval
they who had taken her away must have brought her back.

For when she opened her eyes she was in her own bed, and the things
of their little home were about her, and her father's eyes

were looking down at her, and his lips were kissing her, and the sun
was shining outside, and the birds were singing, and the long grass

was whispering in the breeze, and it was the same as if
she had been asleep during the night and was just awakening

in the morning.
"It was a dream, my child," said Israel, thinking only with how vivid

a sense her eyes had gathered up in that instant of first sight
the picture of that day at the Kasbah.

"A dream!" she cried; "no, no! I _saw_ it!"
Hitherto her dreams had been blind ones, and if she dreamt

of her own people it had not been of their faces, but of the touch
of their hands or the sound of their voices. By one of these

she had always known them, and sometimes it had been her mother's arms
that had been about her, and sometimes her father's lips

that had pressed her forehead, and sometimes Ali's voice
that had rung in her ears.

Israel smoothed her hair and calmed her fears, but thinking both
of her dream and of her artless sayings, he said in his heart,

"She is a child, a child born into life as a maid, and
without the strength of a child's weakness. Oh! great is the wisdom

which orders it so that we come into the world as babes."
Thus realising Naomi's childishness, Israel kept close guard

and watch upon her afterwards. But if she was a gleam of sunlight
in his lonelydwelling, like sunlight she came and went in it,

and one day he found her near to the track leading up to the fondak
in talk with a passing traveller by the way, whom he recognised

for the grossest profligate out of Tetuan. Unveiled, unabashed,
with sweet looks of confidence she was gazing full into the man's

gross face, answering his evil questions with the artless simplicity
of innocence. At one bound Israel was between them; and in a moment

he had torn Naomi away. And that night, while she wept out
her very heart at the first anger that her father had shown her,

Israel himself, in a new terror of his soul, was pouring out