If a bird sang in the air above her, she lifted her sightless eyes.

If she walked in the town on market morning and heard the din of traffic--the cries of the dealers, the "Balak!" of the camel-men, the "Arrah!" of the muleteers, and the twanging ginbri of the story-tellers--she sighed and dropped her head into her breast.
Listening to the wind, she asked if it had eyes or was sightless; and hearing of the mountains that their snowy heads rose into the clouds, she inquired if they were blind, and if they ever talked together in the sky.
But at the awful revelation of her blindness she ceased to be a child, and became a woman.

In the week thereafter she had learned more of the world than in all the years of her life before.

She was no longer a restless gleam of sunlight, a reckless spirit of joy, but a weak, patient, blind maiden, conscious of her great infirmity, humbled by it, and thinking shame of it.
One afternoon, deserting the swing in the patio, she went out with the children into the fields.

The day was hot, and they wandered far down the banks and dry bed of the Marteel.