The marvel was hard to understand.  There was something ghostly in this thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at her and laughed and yet made no voice.  She leaned back in the boat and asked Israel if it was still in the water.  But when at length she had grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming.  She was like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child in her unconscious love of her own loveliness.  Whenever the boat was at rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.

“How beautiful!” she cried, “how beautiful!”

She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water was the wonder of her dancing eyes.  “Oh! how very beautiful!” she cried without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move as she spoke and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed and laughed again with a heart of glee.

Israel looked on for some moments at this sweet picture, and, for all his sense of the dangers of Naomi’s artless joy in her own beauty, he could not find it in his heart to check her.  He had borne too long the pain and shame of one who was father of an afflicted child to deny himself this choking rapture of her recovery.  “Live on like a child always, little one,” he thought; “be a child as long as you can, be a child for ever, my dove, my darling!  Never did the world suffer it that I myself should be a child at all.”

The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly some new fashion of charming strangeness.  All lovely things on the earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds and the flowers.  Also she would lie down in the grass and rest like a lamb, with as little shame and with a grace as sweet.  Not yet had the great mystery dawned that drops on a girl like an unseen mantle out of the sky, and when it has covered her she is a child no more.  Naomi was a child still.  Nay, she was a child a second time, for while she had been blind she had seemed for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation of her infirmity and isolation.  Now she was a weak, patient, blind maiden no longer, but a reckless spirit of joy once again, a restless gleam of human sunlight gathering sunshine into her father’s house.

It was fit and beautiful that she who had lived so long without the better part of the gifts of God should enjoy some of them at length in rare perfection.  Her sight was strong and her hearing was keen, but voice was the gift which she had in abundance.  So sweet, so full, so deep, so soft a voice as Naomi’s came to be, Israel thought he had never heard before.  Ruth’s voice?  Yes, but fraught with inspiration, replete with sparkling life, and passionate with the notes of a joyous heart.  All day long Naomi used it.  She sang as she rose in the morning, and was still singing when she lay down at night.  Wherever people came upon her, they came first upon the sound of her voice.  The farmers heard it across the fields, and sometimes Israel heard it from over the hill by their hut.  Often she seemed to them like a bird that is hidden in a tree, and only known to be there by the outbursts of its song.