what she could never know; that she was infirm, afflicted, cut off; that
there was a strange and lovely and lightsome world lying round about
her, where every one else might sport and find delight, but that her
spirit could not enter it, because she was shut off from it by the great
hand of God.

From that time forward everything seemed to remind her of her
affliction, and she heard its baneful voice at all times. Even her
dreams, though they had no visions, were full of voices that told of
them. If a bird sang in the air above her, she lifted her sightless
eyes. If she walked in the town on market morning and heard the din of
traffic--the cries of the dealers, the "Balak!" of the camel-men,
the "Arrah!" of the muleteers, and the twanging ginbri of the
story-tellers--she sighed and dropped her head into her breast.
Listening to the wind, she asked if it had eyes or was sightless; and
hearing of the mountains that their snowy heads rose into the clouds,
she inquired if they were blind, and if they ever talked together in the
sky.

But at the awful revelation of her blindness she ceased to be a child,
and became a woman. In the week thereafter she had learned more of the
world than in all the years of her life before. She was no longer
a restless gleam of sunlight, a reckless spirit of joy, but a weak,
patient, blind maiden, conscious of her great infirmity, humbled by it,
and thinking shame of it.

One afternoon, deserting the swing in the patio, she went out with the
children into the fields. The day was hot, and they wandered far down
the banks and dry bed of the Marteel. And as they ran and raced, the
little black people plucked the wild flowers, and called to the cattle
and the sheep and the dogs, and whistled to the linnets that whistled to
their young.

Thus the hours went on unheeded. The afternoon passed into evening, the
evening into twilight, the twilight into early night. Then the air grew
empty like a vault, and a solemn quiet fell upon the children, and they
crept to Naomi's side in fear, and took her hands and clung to her
gown. She turned back towards the town, and as they walked in the double
silence of their own hushed tongues and the songless and voiceless
world, the fingers of the little ones closed tightly upon her own.

Then the children cried in terror, "See!"

"What is it?" said Naomi.

The little ones could not tell her. It was only the noiseless summer
lightning, but the children had n