And before them all was one old man in garments that were of the colour of the afternoon sun, with sleeves like the mouths of bells, a curling silver knife at his waistband, and little leather bags hung by yellow cords about his neck.

Beside this man there was a woman of a laughing cruel face; and she herself, Naomi--alone her father being nowhere near--stood in the midst with all eyes upon her.

What happened next she did not know, for blank darkness fell upon everything, and in that interval they who had taken her away must have brought her back.
For when she opened her eyes she was in her own bed, and the things of their little home were about her, and her father's eyes were looking down at her, and his lips were kissing her, and the sun was shining outside, and the birds were singing, and the long grass was whispering in the breeze, and it was the same as if she had been asleep during the night and was just awakening in the morning.
"It was a dream, my child," said Israel, thinking only with how vivid a sense her eyes had gathered up in that instant of first sight the picture of that day at the Kasbah.
"A dream!" she cried; "no, no! I _saw_ it!" Hitherto her dreams had been blind ones, and if she dreamt of her own people it had not been of their faces, but of the touch of their hands or the sound of their voices.

By one of these she had always known them, and sometimes it had been her mother's arms that had been about her, and sometimes her father's lips that had pressed her forehead, and sometimes Ali's voice that had rung in her ears.
Israel smoothed her hair and calmed her fears, but thinking both of her dream and of her artless sayings, he said in his heart, "She is a child, a child born into life as a maid, and without the strength of a child's weakness.

Oh! great is the wisdom which orders it so that we come into the world as babes." Thus realising Naomi's childishness, Israel kept close guard and watch upon her afterwards.