One day she lay very quiet. Ruth scarcely left her side. Suddenly a sharp cry rang through the tent. It was that of the watcher. Entering, the men witnessed a scene that confirmed their worst fears. Ruth was leaning over the couch, and gazing with fixed stare upon the face of her patient, from which the fever flush had vanished. The pallor and rigidness of death were upon her. Her eyes were lustreless, the balls upturned.
"Quick! quick! the draught!" The physician forced some drops through the stiffening lips. The eyes remained fixed.
"It is over! O Jehovah! I would have served thee! Cruel as Baal art thou!" cried Marduk, throwing himself across the couch.
"Hush!" said old Ben Yusef. "The doors of Sheol open. Upbraid no one here; not even thyself. 'The Lord gave. The Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!'"
The old man's trembling voice almost belied the submissive faith expressed by his words, for in a moment he too bowed his head and sobbed.
Ruth held the cold hand in hers, as if to force into it the warmth of her own life. So intense was her yearning look that it seemed as if her soul would break through her countenance and reanimate the face of the dead.
The silence was only for a moment, but it seemed a long time until the physician spoke.
"The doors of Sheol are closing again, and she—" He watched intently his patient's face as he completed the sentence slowly, and as if waiting to verify the words as he uttered them: "She—has—not—passed them."
There was slight twitching of the eyeballs. They resumed their normal position in their sockets. There was in them a soft gleam, as of recognition, not of the watcher, but of something very distant.
"The life throbs again in her wrists," cried Ruth, covering the hands she held with her kisses.