But Israel saw it also, and one day he brought home with him from the
Kasbah a little black boy with a sweet round face and big innocent white
eyes which might have been the eyes of an angel. The boy's name was
Ali, and he was four years old. His father had killed his mother for
infidelity and neglect of their child, and, having no one to buy him out
of prison, he had that day been executed. Then little Ali had been left
alone in the world, and so Israel had taken him.

Ruth welcomed the boy, and adopted him. He had been born a Mohammedan,
but secretly she brought him up as a Jew. And for some years thereafter
no difference did she make between him and her own child that other eyes
could see. They ate together, they walked abroad together, they played
together, they slept together, and the little black head of the boy lay
with the fair head of the girl on the same white pillow.

Strange and pathetic were the relations between these little exiles of
humanity I One knew not whether to laugh or cry at them. First, on Ali's
part, a blank wonderment that when he cried to Naomi, "Come!" she did
not hear, when he asked "Why?" she did not answer; and when he said
"Look!" she did not see, though her blue eyes seemed to gaze full into
his face. Then, a sort of amused bewilderment that her little nervous
fingers were always touching his arms and his hands, and his neck and
his throat. But long before he had come to know that Naomi was not as
he was, that Nature had not given her eyes to see as he saw, and ears to
hear as he heard, and a tongue to speak as he spoke, Nature herself had
overstepped the barriers that divided her from him. He found that Naomi
had come to understand him, whatever in his little way he did, and
almost whatever in his little way he said. So he played with her as he
would have played with any other playmate, laughing with her, calling
to her, and going through his foolish little boyish antics before her.