More satisfying still to the hunger of his heart as a man was his delicious pleasure in Naomi’s new-found life.  She was like a creature born afresh, a radiant and joyful being newly awakened into a world of strange sights.

But it was not at once that she fell upon this pleasure.  What had happened to her was, after all, a simple thing.  Born with cataract on the pupils of her eyes, the emotion of the moment at the Kasbah, when her father’s life seemed to be once more in danger, had—­like a fall or a blow—­luxated the lens and left the pupils clear.  That was all.  Throughout the day whereon the last of her great gifts came to her, when they were cast out of Tetuan, and while they walked hand in hand through the country until they lit upon their home, she had kept her eyes steadfastly closed.  The light terrified her.  It penetrated her delicate lids, and gave her pain.  When for a moment she lifted her lashes and saw the trees, she put out her hand as if to push them away; and when she saw the sky, she raised her arms as if to hold it off.  Everything seemed to touch her eyes.  The bars of sunlight seemed to smite them.  Not until the falling of darkness did her fears subside and her spirits revive.  Throughout the day that followed she sat constantly in the gloom of the blackest corner of their hut.

But this was only her baptism of light on coming out of a world of darkness, just as her fear of the voices of the earth and air had been her baptism of sound on coming out of a land of silence.  Within three days afterwards her terror began to give place to joy; and from that time forward the world was full of wonder to her opened eyes.  Then sweet and beautiful, beyond all dreams of fancy, were her amazement and delight in every little thing that lay about her—­the grass, the weeds, the poorest flower that blew, even the rude implements of the house and the common stones that worked up through the mould—­all old and familiar to her fingers, but new and strange to her eyes, and marvellous as if an angel out of heaven had dropped them down to her.

For many days after the coming of her sight she continued to recognise everything by touch and sound.  Thus one morning early in their life in the cottage, and early also in the day, after Israel had kissed her on the eyelids to awaken her, and she had opened them and gazed up at him as he stooped above her, she looked puzzled for an instant, being still in the mists of sleep, and only when she had closed her eyes again, and put out her hand to touch him, did her face brighten with recognition and her lips utter his name.  “My father,” she murmured, “my father.”

Thus again, the same day, not an hour afterwards, she came running back to the house from the grass bank in front of it, holding a flower in her hand, and asking a world of hot questions concerning it in her broken, lisping, pretty speech.  Why had no one told her that there were flowers that could see?  Here was one which while she looked upon it had opened its beautiful eye and laughed at her.  “What is it?” she asked; “what is it?”