The words Ephraim had announced to Hosea in her name, as a message from
the Most High, had been uttered by unseen lips while she was thinking
under the sycamore of the exodus and the man whom she had loved from her
childhood--and when that day, between midnight and morning, she again sat
beneath the venerable tree and was overpowered by weariness, she had
believed she heard the same voice. The words had vanished from her
memory when she awoke, but she knew that their purport had been sorrowful
and of ill omen.

Spite of the vagueness of the monition, it disturbed her, and the
outcries rising from the pastures certainly were not evoked by joy that
the people had joined her brothers and the first goal of their wanderings
had been successfully gained, as the old man at her side supposed; no,
they were the furious shouts of wrathful, undisciplined men, wrangling
and fighting with fierce hostility on the meadow for a good place to
pitch their tents or the best spot at the wells or on the brink of the
canals to water their cattle.

Wrath, disappointment, despair echoed in the shouts, and when her gaze
sought the point whence they rose loudest, she saw the corpse of a woman
borne on a piece of tent-cloth by railing bondmen and a pale, death-
stricken infant held on the arm of a half naked, frantic man, its father,
who shook his disengaged hand in menace toward the spot where she saw her
brothers.

The next moment she beheld a grey-haired old man, bowed by heavy toil,
raise his fist against Moses. He would have struck him, had he not been
dragged away by others.