son, and carrying a handful of eggs
and a few poor cakes of bread. When at length the scales fell from the
eyes of her mind, and as she trudged along on her bony mule, afraid to
ask her way, she saw herself, with all her fine purposes shrivelled up,
do what she would to be brave, she could not help but cry. It was all
so vain, so foolish; she was such a weak little thing. Her father knew
this, and that was why he told her to stay where he left her. What if he
came home while she was absent! Should she go back?

She had almost resolved to return, struggle as she might to push
forward, when going close under the town walls, near to the very gate,
the Bab Toot whereat she had been cast out with her father remembering
this scene of their abasement with a new sense of its cruelty and shame
born of her own simple troubles, she lit upon a woman who was coming
out.

It was Habeebah. She was now the slave of Ben Aboo, and was just then
stealing away from the Kasbah in the early morning that she might go in
search of Naomi, whose whereabouts and condition she had lately learned.

The two might have passed unknown, for Habeebah was veiled, but that
Naomi had forgotten her blanket and was uncovered. In another moment the
poor frightened girl, with all her brave bearing gone, was weeping on
the black woman's breast.

"Whither are you going?" said Habeebah.

"To my father," Naomi began. "He is in prison; they say he is starving;
I was taking food to him, but I am lost, I don't know my way; and
besides--"

"The very thing!" cried Habeebah.

Habeebah had her own little scheme. It was meant to win emancipation at
the hands of her master, and paradise for her soul when she died. Naomi,
who was a Jewess, was to turn Muslima. That was all. Then her troubles
would end, and wondrous fortune would descend upon her, and her father
who was in prison would be set free.

Now, religion was nothing to Naomi; she hardly understood what it meant.
The differences of faith were less than nothing, but her father was
everything, and so she clutched at Habeebah's bold promises like a
drowning soul at the froth of a breaker.

"My father will be let out of prison? You are sure--quite sure?" she
asked.

"Quite sure," answered Habeebah stoutly.

Naomi's hopes of ever reaching her father were now faint, and her
poor little stock of eggs and bread looked like folly to her new-born
worldliness.

"Very well," she said. "I will turn Muslima."

A