Some minutes he stood in the darkness of the garden, while the guests entered, and until the barefooted servants of the kitchen began to troop in after them with great dishes under huge covers.  Then he held a short parley with the negro gatekeeper, two keys were handed to him, and in another minute he was standing at the door of Naomi’s prison.

Now, carefully as Ali had arranged every detail of his enterprise, down to the removal of the black woman Habeebah from this door, one fact he had never counted with, and that seemed to him then the chief fact of all—­the fact that since he had last looked upon Naomi she had come by the gift of sight, and would now first look upon him.  That he would be the same as a stranger to her, and would have to tell her who he was; that she would have to recognise him by whatsoever means remained to belie the evidence of the newborn sense—­this was the least of Ali’s trouble.  By a swift rebound his heart went back to the fear that had haunted him in the days before he left her with her father on his errand to Shawan.  He was black, and she would see him.

With the gliding of the key into the lock all this, and more than this, flashed upon his mind.  His shame was abject.  It cut him to the quick.  On the other side of that door was she who had been as a sister to him since times that were lost in the blue clouds of childhood.  She had played with him and slept by his side, yet she had never seen his face.  And she was fair as the morning, and he was black as the night!  He had come to deliver her.  Would she recoil from him?

Ali had to struggle with himself not to fly away and leave everything.  But his stout heart remembered itself and held to its purpose.  “What matter?” he thought.  “What matter about me?” he asked himself aloud in a shrill voice and with a brave roll of his round head.  Then he found himself inside the cell.

The place was dark, and Ali drew a long breath of relief.  Naomi must have been lying at the farther end of it.  She spoke when the door was opened.  As though by habit, she framed the name of her jailer Habeebah, and then stopped with a little nervous cry and seemed to rise to her feet.  In his confusion Ali said simply, “It is I,” as though that meant everything.  Recovering himself in a moment he spoke again, and then she knew his voice:  “Naomi!”

“It’s Ali,” she whispered to herself.  After that she cried in a trembling undertone “Ali!  Ali!  Ali!” and came straight in the accustomed darkness to the spot where he stood.

Then, gathering courage and voice together, Ali told her hurriedly why he was there.  When he said that her father was no longer in prison, but at their home near Semsa and waiting to receive her, she seemed almost overcome by her joy.  Half laughing, half weeping, clutching at her breast as if to ease the wild heaving of her bosom she was transformed by his story.

“Hush!” said Ali; “not a sound until we are outside the town,” and Naomi knitted her fingers in his palm, and they passed out of the place.