m that day
forward she took pleasure in all sweet and gentle sounds whatsoever--in
the voices of children at play--in the bleat of the goat--in the
footsteps of them she loved--in the hiss and whirr of her mother's old
spinning-wheel, which now she learned to work--and in Ali's harp, when
he played it in the patio in the cool of the evening.

But even as no eye can see how the seed which has been sown in the
ground first dies and then springs into life, so no tongue can tell what
change was wrought in the pure soul of Naomi when, after her baptism of
sound, the sweet voices of earth first entered it. Neither she herself
nor any one else ever fully realised what that change was, for it was a
beautiful and holy mystery. It was also a great joy, and she seemed to
give herself up to it. No music ever escaped her, and of all human music
she took most pleasure in the singing of love songs. These she listened
to with a simple and rapt delight; their joy seemed to answer to her
joy, and the joyousness of a song of love seemed to gather in the air
wheresoever she went.

There were few of the kind she ever heard, and few of that few were
beautiful, and none were beautifully sung. Fatimah's homely ditties were
all she knew, the same that had been crooned to her a thousand times
when she had not heard. Most of these were songs of the desert and the
caravan, telling of musk and ambergris, and odorous locks and dancing
cypress, and liquid ruby, and lips like wine; and some were warm tales
which the good soul herself hardly understood, of enchanting beauties
whose silence was the door of consent, and of wanton nymphs whose love
tore the veil of their chastity.

But one of them was a song of pure and true passion that seemed to be
the yearning cry of a hungering, unfilled, unsatisfied heart to call
down love out of the skies, or else be carried up to it. This had been a
favourite song of Naomi's mother, and it was from Ruth that Fatimah had
learned it in those anxious watches of the early uncertain days when she
sang it over the cradle to her babe that was deaf after all and did not
hear. Naomi knew nothing of this, but she heard her mother's song at
last, though silent were the lips that first sang it, and it was her
chief and dear delight.

O, where is Love?
Where, where is Love?
Is it of heavenly birth?
Is it a thing of earth?
Where, where is Love?

In her crazy, creechy voice the black woman would s