rry them home by the hand.

And there, in the patio, Ali had hung a swing of hempen rope, suspended
from a bar thrown from parapet to parapet, and on this Naomi would sport
with her little ones. She would be swinging in the midst of them, with
one tiny black maiden on the seat beside her, and one little black man
with high stomach and shaven poll holding on to the rope behind her, and
another mighty Moor in a diminutive white jellab pushing at their feet
in front, and all laughing together, or the children singing as the
swing rose, and she herself listening with head aslant and all her fair
hair rip-rip-rippling down her back and over her neck, and her smiling
white face resting on her shoulder.

It was a beautiful scene of sunny happiness, but out of it came the
first great shadow of the blind girl's life. For it chanced one day
that one of the children--a tiny creature with a slice of the woman in
her--brought a present for Naomi out of her mother's market-basket.
It was a flower, but of a strange kind, that grew only in the distant
mountains where lay the little black one's home. Naomi passed her
fingers over it, and she did not know it.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It's blue," said the child.

"What is blue?" said Naomi

"Blue--don't you know?--blue!" said the child.

"But what is blue?" Naomi asked again, holding the flower in her
restless fingers.

"Why, dear me! can't you see?--blue--the flower, you know," said the
child, in her artless way.

Ali was standing by at the time, and he thought to come to Naomi's
relief. "Blue is a colour," he said.

"A colour?" said Naomi.

"Yes, like--like the sea," he added.

"The sea? Blue? How?" Naomi asked.

Ali tried again. "Like the sky," he said simply.

Naomi's face looked perplexed. "And what is the sky like?" she asked.

At that moment her beautiful face was turned towards Ali's face, and
her great motionless blue orbs seemed to gaze into his eyes. The lad was
pressed hard, and he could not keep back the answer that leapt up to his
tongue. "Like," he said--"like--"

"Well?"

"Like your own eyes, Naomi."

By the old habit of her nervous fingers, she covered her eyes with her
hands, as if the sense of touch would teach her what her other senses
could not tell. But the solemn mystery had dawned on her mind at last:
that she was unlike others; that she was lacking something that every
one else possessed; that the little children who played with her knew