It was a morning of God's own making, and, for joy of its loveliness no less than of her own bounding life, Naomi rose in the boat and opened her lips and arms to the breeze while it played with the rippling currents of her hair, as if she would drink and embrace it.
At that moment a new and dearer wonder came to her, such as every maiden knows whom God has made beautiful, yet none remembers the hour when she knew it first.For, tracing with her eyes the shadow of the cliff and of the continent of cloud that sailed double in two seas of blue to where they were broken by the dazzling half-round of the sun's reflected disc on the shadowed quarter of the boat, she leaned over the side of it, and then saw the reflection of another and lovelier vision.
"Father," she cried with alarm, "a face in the water! Look! look!""It is your own, my child," said Israel."Mine!" she cried.
"The reflection of your face," said Israel; "the light and the water make it."The marvel was hard to understand.There was something ghostly in this thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at her and laughed and yet made no voice.She leaned back in the boat and asked Israel if it was still in the water.
But when at length she had grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming.She was like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child in her unconscious love of her own loveliness.Whenever the boat was at rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.
"How beautiful!" she cried, "how beautiful!"She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water was the wonder of her dancing eyes."Oh! how very beautiful!"she cried without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move as she spoke and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed and laughed again with a heart of glee.