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Israel bent his head and shuddered at seeing the child at the woman's feet. "The darling is as fair as an angel," said Katrina, and she kissed Naomi. The kiss seemed to Israel to smite his own cheeks like a blow.
After living there about ten years Naomi's sons died also, leaving Orpah and Ruth widows, along with their widowed mother-in-law. Then Naomi determined to return to her own land. Orpah and Ruth accompanied Naomi some distance on her journey; then she bade them to leave her, telling each to go back to her mother's house in Moab, while she would pursue her way alone to the land of Judah.
There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, which had ruined the delicate complexion, and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I would fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in infancy.
And at night, when Ruth put them to bed in their little chamber, and Ali knelt with his face towards Jerusalem, Naomi would kneel beside him with a reverent air, and all her laughter would be gone. Then, as he prayed his prayer, her little lips would move as if she were praying too, and her little hands would be clasped together, and her little eyes would be upraised.
So that, to Anne's surprise and somewhat to her mortification, since she had no knowledge of the cause, she saw Charles riding apart with this wooden old veteran, who sat as upright as a ramrod on his wiry-looking black horse, leaving her to the company of Naomi and Mr. Fellowes. Did he really wish not to pursue the topic which had brought Peregrine from his grave?
Then quoth she to her husband, "O my cousin, what wilt thou call her?"; and quoth he, "Whatso thou chooses"; so she said, "Then let us call her Naomi," and he rejoined "Good is thy device."
The old man nodded, he felt too ashamed to speak; he sat with his fine silver head in his hands, while Felix took down and tuned the old violin, on which so many godless lilts had been played in many a wild revel. Mr. Leonard felt that he had failed his religion. He could not give Naomi the help that was in it for her. Felix drew the bow softly, perplexedly over the strings.
"I know ten hymns without a mistake," Naomi would boast, and by hymns she meant what we call psalms. "I can recite the Song of Deborah and the Song of Hannah. I can tell all the story about them, too, and, oh, ever so many more." Her favorite story was that of the Naomi for whom she had been named.
Then Naomi blessed Boaz, and told Ruth that he was one of their near relatives. And so Ruth gleaned in the fields of Boaz through all the barley and the wheat harvest. When all the reaping was done, the grain was threshed on a piece of ground made very smooth and level. The sheaves were beaten, and then the straw was taken away, and the grain and chaff below it was winnowed.
What had happened to Naomi during the two months and a half while Israel lay at Shawan is this: After the first agony of their parting, in which she was driven back by the soldiers when she attempted to follow them, she sat down in a maze of pain, without any true perception of the evil which had befallen her, but with her father's warning voice and his last words in her ear: "Stay here.
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