“Yea,” she said, tremulously. “Thou wilt have sad enough meditations, longing for Rachel and thinking of our home in Israel and of father and mother.” There was a long pause. “But thou must not grieve over me. At first I thought I should die here, until I knew that somebody loved me. Now Milcah doth a little, and I think my mistress will, but I have never had to wonder about Isaac. He always hath. He will watch over me as thou wouldst.”
She leaned confidingly against the soldier and he slipped his arm around her: “The heart of my little maid can safely trust in me,” he assured her. Then, to Benjamin: “Behold, the other maid of whom we spoke.”
Miriam looked up wonderingly, not understanding Benjamin’s embarrassment nor Isaac’s defiance, but neither troubled her. She smiled upon them impartially. “And what hath made it easy for me to love Isaac,” she went on, “is because he loveth thee so much, Benjamin. It hath made me so happy. Else I could not bear things even now.”
She was caressing their two hands, holding them to her cheeks and patting them; thus she failed to see that each young man avoided the other’s eye.
“I love thee both so very much,” she confided.
They each smiled down upon her indulgently, and somehow their eyes met—with the smile still in them, and this time they did not turn away. Oddly enough the coldness, the constraint faded before that look as snow disappears before the genial warmth of the sun. They parted in a manner quite satisfactory to the little maid, who beamed upon them both. Suspicion and resentment had fled before the affectionate trust of a child!
CHAPTER XIII
CHANGES
The death of Milcah’s mother made changes in the House of Naaman. Adah, its mistress, was inconsolable, not with grief but with vexation.
“So Milcah will sit on the floor for a whole week and mourn! Of course I wish her to treat her mother’s memory with respect. I am myself willing to pay for the mourning men and mourning women. I will provide the spices and linen in which the body is to be wrapped. I will even have it laid in the rocky tomb her people prefer, but I cannot go without bathing and dressing for a week. Who will see to my raiment and my perfumes?”
To Miriam, who had brought the message, this was a very simple matter. “Thou hast so many servants,” she began, but her mistress interrupted irritably: