That one day’s experience did more than all her life before it to fill her with the bitter fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Her illusions fell away from her, and her sweet childish faith was broken down.  She saw herself as she was:  a simple girl, a child ignorant of the ways of the world, going alone on a long journey unknown to her, thinking to succour her father in prison, and carrying a handful of eggs and a few poor cakes of bread.  When at length the scales fell from the eyes of her mind, and as she trudged along on her bony mule, afraid to ask her way, she saw herself, with all her fine purposes shrivelled up, do what she would to be brave, she could not help but cry.  It was all so vain, so foolish; she was such a weak little thing.  Her father knew this, and that was why he told her to stay where he left her.  What if he came home while she was absent!  Should she go back?

She had almost resolved to return, struggle as she might to push forward, when going close under the town walls, near to the very gate, the Bab Toot whereat she had been cast out with her father remembering this scene of their abasement with a new sense of its cruelty and shame born of her own simple troubles, she lit upon a woman who was coming out.

It was Habeebah.  She was now the slave of Ben Aboo, and was just then stealing away from the Kasbah in the early morning that she might go in search of Naomi, whose whereabouts and condition she had lately learned.

The two might have passed unknown, for Habeebah was veiled, but that Naomi had forgotten her blanket and was uncovered.  In another moment the poor frightened girl, with all her brave bearing gone, was weeping on the black woman’s breast.

“Whither are you going?” said Habeebah.

“To my father,” Naomi began.  “He is in prison; they say he is starving; I was taking food to him, but I am lost, I don’t know my way; and besides—­”

“The very thing!” cried Habeebah.

Habeebah had her own little scheme.  It was meant to win emancipation at the hands of her master, and paradise for her soul when she died.  Naomi, who was a Jewess, was to turn Muslima.  That was all.  Then her troubles would end, and wondrous fortune would descend upon her, and her father who was in prison would be set free.

Now, religion was nothing to Naomi; she hardly understood what it meant.  The differences of faith were less than nothing, but her father was everything, and so she clutched at Habeebah’s bold promises like a drowning soul at the froth of a breaker.

“My father will be let out of prison?  You are sure—­quite sure?” she asked.

“Quite sure,” answered Habeebah stoutly.

Naomi’s hopes of ever reaching her father were now faint, and her poor little stock of eggs and bread looked like folly to her new-born worldliness.

“Very well,” she said.  “I will turn Muslima.”

A few minutes afterwards she was riding by Habeebah’s side into the town, through the Bab Toot across the Feddan, and up to the courtyard of the Kasbah, which had witnessed the beginning of her own and her father’s degradation.  Then, tethering the beast in the open stables there, Habeebah took Naomi into her own little room and left her alone for some minutes, while she hastened to Ben Aboo in secret with her wondrous news.