When Israel made ready to go to Shawan, Naomi clung to him to hinder him, as if remembering his long absence when he went to Fez, and connecting it with the illness that came to her in his absence; or as seeming to see, with those eyes that were blind to the ways of the world, what was to befall him before he returned.  He put her from him with many tender words, and smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead, as though to chide her while he blessed her for so much love.  But her dread increased, and she held to him like a child to its mother’s robe.  And at last, when he unloosed her hands and pushed them away as if in anger, and after that laughed lightly as if to tell her that he knew her meaning yet had no fear, her trouble rose to a storm and she fell to a fit of weeping.

“Tut! tut! what is this?” he said.  “I will be back to-morrow.  Do you hear, my child?—­tomorrow!  At sunset to-morrow.”

When he was gone, the terror that had so suddenly possessed her seemed to increase.  Her face was red, her mouth was dry, her eyelids quivered, and her hands were restless.  If she sat she rose quickly; if she stood she walked again more fast.  Sometimes she listened with head aside, sometimes moaned, sometimes wept outright, and sometimes she muttered to herself in noises such as none had heard from her lips before.

The bondwomen could find no-way to comfort her.  Indeed, the trouble of her heart took hold of them.  When she plucked Fatimah by the gown, and with her blind eyes, that were also wet, seemed to look sadly into the black woman’s face, as if asking for her father, like a dog for its master that is dead, Fatimah shed tears as well, partly in pity of her fears, and partly in terror of the unknown troubles still to come which God Himself might have revealed to her.

“Alas! little dumb soul, what is to happen now?” cried Fatimah.

“Alack! girl,” said Habeebah, “the maid is sickening again.”

And this was all that the good souls could make of her restless agitation.  She slept that night from sheer exhaustion, a deep lethargic slumber, apparently broken once or twice by troubled dreams.  When she awoke in the morning at the first sound of the voice of the mooddin, the evil dreams seemed to be with her still.  She appeared to be moving along in them like one spell-bound by a great dread that she could not utter, as if she were living through a nightmare of the day.  Then long hour followed long hour, but the inquietude of her mood did not abate.  Her bosom heaved, her throat throbbed, her excitement became hysterical.  Sometimes she broke into wild, inarticulate shouts, and sometimes the black women could have believed, in spite of knowledge and reason, that she was muttering and speaking words, though with a wild disorder of utterance.