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 never seen it before.  With broad white flashes it lit up the land as far as from the bed of the river in the valley to the white peaks of the mountains.  At every flash the little people shrieked in their fear, and there was no one there to comfort them save Naomi only, and she was blind and could not see what they saw.  With helpless hands she held to their hands and hurried home, over the darkening fields, through the palpitating sheets of dazzling light, leading on, yet seeing nothing.

But Israel saw Naomi’s shame.  The blindness which was a sense of humiliation to her became a sense of burning wrong to him.  He had asked God to give her speech, and had promised to be satisfied.  “Give her speech, O Lord,” he had cried, “speech that shall lift her above the creatures of the field, speech whereby alone she may ask and know.”  But what was speech without sight to her who had always been blind?  What was all the world to one who had never seen it?  Only as Paradise is to Man, who can but idly dream of its glories.