And there, in the patio, Ali had hung a swing of hempen rope, suspended from a bar thrown from parapet to parapet, and on this Naomi would sport with her little ones.  She would be swinging in the midst of them, with one tiny black maiden on the seat beside her, and one little black man with high stomach and shaven poll holding on to the rope behind her, and another mighty Moor in a diminutive white jellab pushing at their feet in front, and all laughing together, or the children singing as the swing rose, and she herself listening with head aslant and all her fair hair rip-rip-rippling down her back and over her neck, and her smiling white face resting on her shoulder.

It was a beautiful scene of sunny happiness, but out of it came the first great shadow of the blind girl’s life.  For it chanced one day that one of the children—­a tiny creature with a slice of the woman in her—­brought a present for Naomi out of her mother’s market-basket.  It was a flower, but of a strange kind, that grew only in the distant mountains where lay the little black one’s home.  Naomi passed her fingers over it, and she did not know it.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s blue,” said the child.

“What is blue?” said Naomi

“Blue—­don’t you know?—­blue!” said the child.

“But what is blue?” Naomi asked again, holding the flower in her restless fingers.

“Why, dear me! can’t you see?—­blue—­the flower, you know,” said the child, in her artless way.

Ali was standing by at the time, and he thought to come to Naomi’s relief.  “Blue is a colour,” he said.

“A colour?” said Naomi.

“Yes, like—­like the sea,” he added.

“The sea?  Blue?  How?” Naomi asked.

Ali tried again.  “Like the sky,” he said simply.

Naomi’s face looked perplexed.  “And what is the sky like?” she asked.

At that moment her beautiful face was turned towards Ali’s face, and her great motionless blue orbs seemed to gaze into his eyes.  The lad was pressed hard, and he could not keep back the answer that leapt up to his tongue.  “Like,” he said—­“like—­”

“Well?”

“Like your own eyes, Naomi.”

By the old habit of her nervous fingers, she covered her eyes with her hands, as if the sense of touch would teach her what her other senses could not tell.  But the solemn mystery had dawned on her mind at last:  that she was unlike others; that she was lacking something that every one else possessed; that the little children who played with her knew what she could never know; that she was infirm, afflicted, cut off; that there was a strange and lovely and lightsome world lying round about her, where every one else might sport and find delight, but that her spirit could not enter it, because she was shut off from it by the great hand of God.