“Leave her!” she cried.  “Let us see what the child will do!”

At that moment Ali’s playing came to as end, and the boy let the harp pass to Naomi’s clinging fingers, and then, half sitting, half kneeling on the ground beside it, the girl took it to herself.  She caressed it, she patted it with her hand, she touched its strings, and then a faint smile crossed her rosy lips.  She laid her cheek against it and touched its strings again, and then she laughed aloud.  She flung off her slippers and the garment that covered her beautiful arms, and laid her pure flesh against the harp wheresoever her flesh might cling, and touched its strings once more, and then her very heart seemed to laugh with delight.

Now, what is to follow will seem to be no better than a superstitious saying, but true it is, nevertheless, and simple sooth for all it sounds so strange, that though Naomi was deaf as the grave, and had never yet heard music, and though she was untaught and knew nothing of the notes of a harp to strike them yet she swept the strings to strange sounds such as no man had ever listened to before and none could follow.

It was not music that the little maiden made to her ear, but only motion to her body, and just as the deaf who are deaf alone are sometimes found to take pleasure in all forms of percussion, and to derive from them some of the sensations of sound—­the trembling of the air after thunder, the quivering of the earth after cannon, and the quaking of vast walls after the ringing of mighty bells—­so Naomi, who was blind as well and had no sense save touch, found in her fingers, which had gathered up the force of all the other senses, the power to reproduce on this instrument of music the movement of things that moved about her—­the patter of the leaves of the fig-tree in the patio of her home, the swirl of the great winds on the hill-top, the plash of rain on her face, and the rippling of the levanter in her hair.

This was all the witchery of Naomi’s playing, yet, because every emotion in Nature had its harmony, so there was harmony of some wild sort in the music that was struck by the girl’s fingers out of the strings of the harp.  But, more than her music, which was perhaps, only a rhapsody of sound, was the frenzy of the girl herself as she made it.  She lifted her head like a bird, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, and as she played, she laughed again and again.

There was something fascinating and magical in the spectacle of the beautiful fair face aglow with joy, the rounded limbs (visible through the robes) clinging to the sides of the harp, and the delicate white fingers flying across the strings.  There was something gruesome and awful, as well, for the face of the girl was blind, and her ears heard nothing of the sounds that her fingers were making.