d passionate talk. There was a strange
and bodeful silence on every side. The coffee-house of the Moors beyond
the gate was already lit up, and the door was open, but the floor was
empty. No snake-charmers, no jugglers, no story-tellers, with their
circles of squatting spectators, were to be seen or heard. These
professors of science and magic and jocularity had never before been
absent. Even the blind beggars, crouching under the town walls, were
silent. But out of the mosques there came a deep low chant as of many
voices, from great numbers gathered within.

"The girl was right," said Fatimah; "something has happened."

"What is it?" said Habeebah.

"Nay, how should I know that either?" said Fatimah.

"I tell you we are a pair of fools," said Habeebah.

Meantime Naomi held their hands, and they must needs follow where she
led. Her body was between them; they were borne along by her feeble
frame as by an irresistible force. And pitiful it would have seemed,
and perhaps foolish also, if any human eye had seen them then, these
helpless children of God, going whither they knew not and wherefore they
knew not, save that a fear that was like to madness drew them on.

"Listen! I hear something," said Fatimah.

"Where?" said Habeebah.

"The way we are going," said Fatimah.

On and on Naomi passed from street to street. They were the same streets
whereby she had returned to her father's house on the day that her
goat was slain. Never since then had she trodden them, but she neither
altered not turned aside to the right or the left, but made straight
forward, until she came to the Sok el Foki, and to the place where the
goat had fallen before the foaming jaws of the dog from the Mukabar.
Then she could go no farther.

"Holy saints, what is this?" cried Habeebah.

"Didn't I tell you--the girl heard something?" said Fatimah.

"God's face shine on us," said Habeebah. "What is all this crowd?"

An immense throng covered the upper half of the market-square, and
overflowed into the streets and arched alleys leading to the Kasbah. It
was not a close and dense crowd of white-hooded forms such as gathered
on that spot on market morning--a seething, steaming, moving mass of
haiks and jellabs and Maghribi blankets, with here and there a bare
shaven head and plaited crown-lock--but a great crowd of dark figures
in black gowns and skull-caps. The assemblage was of Jews only--Jews of
every age and class and condition, from the