She neither laughed nor wept.

When Israel kissed her pale brow, she did not stretch out her arms as she had done before to draw down his head to her lips.

Calmly, silently, sadly, gracefully, she passed from day to day, without feeling and without thought--a beautiful statue of flesh and blood.
What God was doing with her slumbering spirit then, only He Himself knows; but the time of her awakening came, and with it came her first delight in the new gift with which God had gifted her.
To revive her spirits and to quicken her memory, Israel had taken her to walk in the fields outside the town where she had loved to play in her childhood--the wild places covered with the peppermint and the pink, the thyme, the marjoram, and the white broom, where she had gathered flowers in the old times, when God had taught her.

The day was sweet, for it was the cool of the morning, the air was soft, and the wind was gentle, and under the shady trees the covert of the reeds lay quiet.

And whither Naomi would, thither they had wandered, without object and without direction.
On and on, hand in hand, they had walked through the winding paths of the oleander, between the creeping fences of the broom, and the sprawling limbs of the prickly pear, until they came to a stream, a tributary of the Marteel, trickling down from the wild heights of the Akhmas, over the light pebbles of its narrow bed.