oment a new and dearer wonder came to her, such as every maiden
knows whom God has made beautiful, yet none remembers the hour when she
knew it first. For, tracing with her eyes the shadow of the cliff and of
the continent of cloud that sailed double in two seas of blue to where
they were broken by the dazzling half-round of the sun's reflected disc
on the shadowed quarter of the boat, she leaned over the side of it, and
then saw the reflection of another and lovelier vision.

"Father," she cried with alarm, "a face in the water! Look! look!"

"It is your own, my child," said Israel. "Mine!" she cried.

"The reflection of your face," said Israel; "the light and the water
make it."

The marvel was hard to understand. There was something ghostly in this
thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at
her and laughed and yet made no voice. She leaned back in the boat and
asked Israel if it was still in the water. But when at length she had
grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming. She was
like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child
in her unconscious love of her own loveliness. Whenever the boat was at
rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.

"How beautiful!" she cried, "how beautiful!"

She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water
was the wonder of her dancing eyes. "Oh! how very beautiful!" she cried
without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move 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