g spirit then, only He Himself
knows; but the time of her awakening came, and with it came her first
delight in the new gift with which God had gifted her.

To revive her spirits and to quicken her memory, Israel had taken her to
walk in the fields outside the town where she had loved to play in her
childhood--the wild places covered with the peppermint and the pink, the
thyme, the marjoram, and the white broom, where she had gathered flowers
in the old times, when God had taught her. The day was sweet, for it was
the cool of the morning, the air was soft, and the wind was gentle, and
under the shady trees the covert of the reeds lay quiet. And whither
Naomi would, thither they had wandered, without object and without
direction.

On and on, hand in hand, they had walked through the winding paths
of the oleander, between the creeping fences of the broom, and the
sprawling limbs of the prickly pear, until they came to a stream, a
tributary of the Marteel, trickling down from the wild heights of the
Akhmas, over the light pebbles of its narrow bed. And there--but by what
impulse or what chance Israel never knew--Naomi had withdrawn her hand
from his hand; and at the next moment, in scarcely more time than it
took him to stoop to the ground and rise again, suddenly as if she had
sunk into the earth, or been lifted into the sky, Naomi disappeared from
his sight.

Israel pushed the low boughs apart, expecting to find her by his side,
but she was nowhere near. He called her by her name, thinking she would
answer with the only language of her lips, the old language of her
laugh.

"Naomi! Naomi! Come, come, my child, where are you?"

But no sound came back to him.

Again he called, not as before in a tone of remonstrance, but with a
voice of fear.

"Naomi, Naomi! Where are you? where? where?"

Then he listened and waited, yet heard nothing, neither her laugh nor
the rustle of her robe, nor the light beat of her footstep.

Nevertheless, she had passed over the grass from the spot where she had
left him, without waywardness or thought of evil, only missing his hand
and trying to recover it, then becoming afraid and walking rapidly,
until the dense foliage between them had hidden her from sight and
deadened the sound of his voice.

Opening a way between the long leaves of an aloe, Israel found her at
length in the place whereto she had wandered. It was a short bend of the
brook, where dark old trees overshadowed the wa