weeping Miriam. He had met her a hundred
times and she had shown herself now haughty, now discontented, now
exacting and now wrathful, but never before soft or sad. To-day, for the
first time, she had opened her heart to him; the tears which disfigured
her countenance gave her character a value which it had never before had
in his eyes, and when he saw her weak and unhappy he felt ashamed of his
hardness. He went up to her kindly and said: "You need not cry; come to
the well again always, I will not prevent you."

His deep voice sounded soft and kind as he spoke, but she sobbed more
passionately than before, almost convulsively, and she tried to speak
but she could not. Trembling in every slender limb, shaken with grief,
and overwhelmed with sorrow, the slight shepherdess stood before him,
and he felt as if he must help her. His passionate pity cut him to the
heart and fettered his by no means ready tongue.

As he could find no word of comfort, he took the water-gourd in his left
hand and laid his right, in which he had hitherto held it, gently on her
shoulder. She started, but she let him do it; he felt her warm breath;
he would have drawn back, but he felt as if he could not; he hardly knew
whether she was crying or laughing while she let his hand rest on her
black waving hair.

She did not move. At last she raised her head, her eyes flashed into
his, and at the same instant he felt two slender arms clasped round his
neck. He felt as if a sea were roaring in his ears, and fire blazing in
his eyes. A nameless anguish seized him; he tore himself violently free,
and with a loud cry as if all the spirits of hell were after him he fled
up the steps that led from the well, and heeded not that his water-jar
was shattered into a thousand pieces against the rocky wall.

She stood looking after him as if spell-bound. Then she struck her
slender hand against her forehead, threw herself down by the spring
again and stared into space; there she lay motionless, only her mouth
continued to twitch.

When the shadow of the palm-tree grew longer she sprang up, called
her goats, and looked up, listening, to the rock-steps by which he had
vanished; the twilight is short in the neighborhood of the tropics, and
she knew that she would be overtaken by the darkness on the stony and
fissured road down the valley if she lingered any longer. She feared
the terrors of the night, the spirits and demons, and a thousand vague
dangers whose na