"Live on like a child always, little one," he thought; "be a child as long as you can, be a child for ever, my dove, my darling! Never did the world suffer it that I myself should be a child at all." The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly some new fashion of charming strangeness.

All lovely things on the earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds and the flowers.

Also she would lie down in the grass and rest like a lamb, with as little shame and with a grace as sweet.

Not yet had the great mystery dawned that drops on a girl like an unseen mantle out of the sky, and when it has covered her she is a child no more.

Naomi was a child still.
Nay, she was a child a second time, for while she had been blind she had seemed for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation of her infirmity and isolation.