"She listens with every feature and every line of it." It was the awakening of her soul to the soul of music, and from that day forward she took pleasure in all sweet and gentle sounds whatsoever--in the voices of children at play--in the bleat of the goat--in the footsteps of them she loved--in the hiss and whirr of her mother's old spinning-wheel, which now she learned to work--and in Ali's harp, when he played it in the patio in the cool of the evening.
But even as no eye can see how the seed which has been sown in the ground first dies and then springs into life, so no tongue can tell what change was wrought in the pure soul of Naomi when, after her baptism of sound, the sweet voices of earth first entered it.

Neither she herself nor any one else ever fully realised what that change was, for it was a beautiful and holy mystery.

It was also a great joy, and she seemed to give herself up to it.

No music ever escaped her, and of all human music she took most pleasure in the singing of love songs.

These she listened to with a simple and rapt delight; their joy seemed to answer to her joy, and the joyousness of a song of love seemed to gather in the air wheresoever she went.
There were few of the kind she ever heard, and few of that few were beautiful, and none were beautifully sung.