e, 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 lonely
dwelling, 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 a new
petition to God. "O Lord, my God," he cried, "when she was blind and
dumb and deaf she was a thing apart, she was a child in no peril from
herself for Thy hand did guide her, and in none from the world, for no
man dared outrage her infirmity. But now she is a maid, and her dangers
are many, for she is beautiful, and the heart of man is evil. Keep me
with her always, O Lord, to guard and guide her! Let me not leave her,
for she is without knowledge of good and evil. Spare me a little
while longer, though I am stricken in years. For her sake spare me, Oh
Lord--i