While the good souls were dividing her possessions among them, Naomi was awakening to some vague sense of her difficulties and dangers.  She had thought it would be easy to ask her way, but now that she had need to do so she was afraid to speak.  The sight of a strange face alarmed her, and she was terrified when she met a company of wandering Arabs changing pasture, with the young women and children on camels, the old women trudging on foot under loads of cans and kettles, the boys driving the herds, and the men, armed with long flintlocks, riding their prancing barbs.  Her poor little mule came to a stand in the midst of this cavalcade, and she was too bewildered to urge it on.  Also her fear which had first caused her to cover her face with the blanket that her neighbour had given her, now made her forget to do so, and the men as they passed her peered close into her eyes.  Such glances made her blood to tingle.  They seared her very soul, and she began to know the meaning of shame.

Nevertheless, she tried to keep up a brave heart and to push forward.  “He is starving in prison,” she told herself; “I must lose no time.”  It was a weary journey.  Everything was new to her, and nearly everything was terrible.  She was even perplexed to see that however far she travelled she came upon men and women and children.  It was so strange that all the world was peopled.  Yet sometimes she wished there were more people everywhere.  That was when she was crossing a barren waste with no house in sight and never a sign of human life on any side.  But oftener she wished that the people were not so many; and that was when the children mocked at her mule, or the women jeered at her as if she must needs be a base person because she was alone, or the men laughed and leered into her uncovered face.

Before she had gone many miles her heart began to fail.  Everything was unlike what she expected.  She had thought the world so good that she had but to say to any that asked her of her errand, “My father is in prison, they say that he is starving; I am taking him food,” and every one would help her forward.  Though she had never put it to herself so, yet she had reckoned in this way in spite of the warnings of her neighbours.  But no one was helping her forward; few were looking on her with goodwill, and fewer still with pity and cheer.

The jogging of the mule, a most bony and stiff-limbed beast, had flattened the panniers that hung by its side, and made the round cakes of bread to protrude from the open mouth of one of them.  Seeing this, a line of market-women going by, with bags of charcoal on their backs, snatched a cake each as they passed and munched them and laughed.  Naomi tried to protest.  “The bread is for my father,” she faltered; “he is in prison; they say he—­” But the expostulation that began thus timidly broke down of itself, for the women laughed again out of their mouths choked with the bread, and in another moment they were gone.