sunset
on the following day.

That time was now come. In eagerness and impatience, in hot blood and
anger, the people had gathered in the Sok three hours after midday. The
Judges had reassembled in the synagogue in the early morning. They had
not broken bread since yesterday, for the day that condemned a son of
Israel to death must be a fast-day to his judges.

As the afternoon wore on, the doors of the synagogue were thrown open.
The sentence was not ready yet, but the judges in council were near
to their decision. At the open door the reader of the synagogue had
stationed himself, holding a flag in his hand. Under the gate of the
Mellah a second messenger was standing, so placed that he could see the
movement of the flag. If the flag fell, the sentence would be "death,"
and the man under the gate would carry the tidings to the people
gathered in the market-place. Then the three-and-twenty judges would
come in procession and tell what steps had been taken that the doom
pronounced might be carried into effect.

Amid all their loud uproar, and notwithstanding the wild anger which
seemed to consume them, the people turned at intervals of a few minutes
to glance back towards the Mellah gate.

If the angels were looking down, surely it was a pitiful sight--these
children of Zion in a strange land, where they were held as dogs and
vermin and human scavengers to the Muslim; thinking and speaking and
acting as their fathers had done any time for five thousand years
before; again judging it expedient that one man should die rather than
the whole people be brought to destruction; again probing their crafty
heads, if not their hearts, for an artifice whereby their scapegoat
might be killed by the hand of their enemy; children indeed, for all
that some of their heads were bald, and some of their beards were
grizzled, and some of their faces were wrinkled and hard and fierce;
little children of God writhing in the grip of their great trouble.

Such was the scene to which Naomi had come, and such had been the doings
of the town since the hour when her father left her. What hand had led
her? What power had taught her? Was it merely that her far-reaching
ears had heard the tumult? Had some unknown sense, groping in darkness,
filled her with a vague terror, too indefinite to be called a thought,
of great and impending evil? Or was it some other influence, some higher
leading? Was it that the Lord was in His heaven that night as a