er, 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, jealous frailty
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
outsid