As the afternoon wore on, the doors of the synagogue were thrown open.  The sentence was not ready yet, but the judges in council were near to their decision.  At the open door the reader of the synagogue had stationed himself, holding a flag in his hand.  Under the gate of the Mellah a second messenger was standing, so placed that he could see the movement of the flag.  If the flag fell, the sentence would be “death,” and the man under the gate would carry the tidings to the people gathered in the market-place.  Then the three-and-twenty judges would come in procession and tell what steps had been taken that the doom pronounced might be carried into effect.

Amid all their loud uproar, and notwithstanding the wild anger which seemed to consume them, the people turned at intervals of a few minutes to glance back towards the Mellah gate.

If the angels were looking down, surely it was a pitiful sight—­these children of Zion in a strange land, where they were held as dogs and vermin and human scavengers to the Muslim; thinking and speaking and acting as their fathers had done any time for five thousand years before; again judging it expedient that one man should die rather than the whole people be brought to destruction; again probing their crafty heads, if not their hearts, for an artifice whereby their scapegoat might be killed by the hand of their enemy; children indeed, for all that some of their heads were bald, and some of their beards were grizzled, and some of their faces were wrinkled and hard and fierce; little children of God writhing in the grip of their great trouble.

Such was the scene to which Naomi had come, and such had been the doings of the town since the hour when her father left her.  What hand had led her?  What power had taught her?  Was it merely that her far-reaching ears had heard the tumult?  Had some unknown sense, groping in darkness, filled her with a vague terror, too indefinite to be called a thought, of great and impending evil?  Or was it some other influence, some higher leading?  Was it that the Lord was in His heaven that night as always, and that when the two black bondwomen in their helpless fear were following the blind maiden through the darkening streets she in her turn was following God?

When Fatimah and Habeebah saw what it was to which Naomi had led them, though they were sorely concerned at it, yet they were relieved as well, and put by the worst of the fears with which her strange behaviour had infected them.  And remembering that she was the daughter of Israel, and they were his servants, and neither thinking themselves safe from danger if they stayed any longer where his name was bandied about as a reproach, nor fully knowing how many of the curses that were heaped upon him found a way to Naomi’s mind, they were for turning again and going back to the house.

“Come,” said Habeebah; “let us go—­we are not safe.”

“Yes,” said Fatimah; “let us take the poor child back.”