What pleasure could there be for her in visiting a stranger's baby which she could not even see? A short time ago, to hold the soft little body close and to feel the tiny clinging hands might have given her a moment's happiness; but to-day her heart was so full of misery that there was no room in it for joy to enter. She longed to sink down on the stable floor. Only her love for Ezra kept her moving.
She felt the straw before the manger beneath her feet, and she dropped to her knees and stretched out a timid hand.
Yes, the Mother and Child were before her.
She fingered the hem of the cloak wrapped about the young Mother, but she could not bring herself to touch the little Child.
"I care not! I care not!" thought Naomi hopelessly. "What to me is this Baby? Why should Ezra wish me to visit this Child?"
As if in answer to her unspoken question, with a sudden lovely gesture, the Child leaned forward. His tiny fingers touched Naomi's forehead and His hands rested for an instant upon her darkened eyes.
Naomi opened and closed her eyes rapidly. She rose to her feet and stared about her. Was it a dream, the same kind of a dream with which she had so often lightened the weary hours of darkness, the long watches of the night, when she had called to mind some old familiar scene—her mother at the well, the country road, Ezra hastening home from school? Now the inn stable rose before her. Did she really see the nose of an ox thrusting itself over the stall? Or did she only dream the mound of hay, and on it the young Mother wrapped in a wide blue cloak and in her arms a Child, at the velvet touch of Whose tiny hands the black curtain had dropped from before her eyes?
Naomi rubbed her hands together and looked down at them. Yes, they were her own hands. There was the familiar little brown spot on the inside of her third finger. Her dress? Yes, that was an old friend, the yellow and red striped robe. She had worn it the day in the garden that she had given her four scarlet poppies in exchange for little Three Legs.
Then it was true! She did see. But how had it happened? Why at the touch of this Baby hand had her sight been restored?