And truly a flower she was of herself, whereto
the wind alone could whisper, and only the sun could speak aloud.

Sweet and touching were the efforts she sometimes made to cling to them
that were about her. Thus her heart was the heart of a child, and she
knew no delight like to that of playing with other children. But her
father's house was under a ban; no child of any neighbour in Tetuan was
allowed to cross its threshold, and, save for the children whom she met
in the fields when she walked there by her mother's hand, no child did
she ever meet.

Ruth saw this, and then, for the first time, she became conscious of
the isolation in which she had lived since her marriage with Israel. She
herself had her husband for companion and comrade, but her little Naomi
was doubly and trebly alone--first, alone as a child that is the only
child of her parents; again, alone as a child whose parents are cut off
from the parents of other children; and yet again, once more, alone as a
child that is blind and dumb.

But Israel saw it also, and one day he brought home with him from the
Kasbah a little black boy with a sweet round face and big innocent white
eyes which might have been the eyes of an angel. The boy's name was
Ali, and he was four years old. His father had killed his mother for
infidelity and neglect of their child, and, having no one to buy him out
of prison, he had that day been executed. Then little Ali had been left
alone in the world, and so Israel had taken him.

Ruth welcomed the boy, and adopted him. He had been born a Mohammedan,
but secretly she brought him up as a Jew. And for some years thereafter
no difference did she make between him and her own child that other eyes
could see. They ate together, they walked abroad together, they played
together, they slept together, and the little black head of the boy lay
with the fair head of the girl on the same white pillow.

Strange and pathetic were the relations between these little exiles of
humanity I One knew not whether to laugh or cry at them. First, on Ali's
part, a blank wonderment that when he cried to Naomi, "Come!" she did
not hear, when he asked "Why?" she did not answer; and when he said
"Look!" she did not see, though her blue eyes seemed to gaze full into
his face. Then, a sort of amused bewilderment that her little nervous
fingers were always touching his arms and his hands, and his neck and
his throat. But long before he had come to know that Naom