Seeing that Ra'hel kept silence, the old woman rose and sat down near her, and winking her eyes, the brown lids of which rose and fell like a bat's wing, she whispered in the Hebrew tongue, "Mistress, nothing good will come of this woman." "Why do you think so, Thamar?" answered Ra'hel, in the same low tone and using the same language. "It is strange," went on the suspicious Thamar, "that she should have fainted there, and not elsewhere." "She fell at the spot where weakness came upon her." The old woman shook her head doubtfully. "Do you suppose," said Poeri's beloved, "that her faint was simulated? The dissector might have cut her side with his sharp stone, so like a dead body did she seem. Her dull eyes, her pale lips, her pallid cheeks, her limp limbs, her skin as cold as that of the dead,--these things cannot be counterfeited." "No, doubtless," replied Thamar, "although there are women clever enough to feign all these symptoms, for some reason or another, so skilfully as to deceive the most clear-sighted. I believe that the maiden had swooned, as a matter of fact." "Then what are you suspicious of?" "How did she happen to be there in the middle of the night; in this distant quarter inhabited only by the poor captives of our tribe whom the cruel Pharaoh employs in making brick, and to whom he refuses the straw necessary to burn the bricks? What motive brought that Egyptian woman to our wretched huts? Why was her garment soaking wet, as if she had just emerged from a pool or from the river?" "I know no more than you do," replied Ra'hel. "Suppose she were a spy of our masters'," said the old woman, whose fierce eyes were lighted up with hatred. "Great events are preparing,--who knows whether the alarm has not been given?" "How could that young girl, ill as she is, hurt us? She is in our hands, weak, alone, ill. Besides, we can, at the least suspicious sign, keep her prisoner until the day of deliverance." "In any case, she is not to be trusted. See how delicate and soft are her hands!" And old Thamar raised one of the arms of the sleeping Tahoser. "In what respect can the fineness of her skin endanger us?" "Oh, imprudent youth!" said Thamar; "oh, mad youth! which cannot see anything, which walks through life trustfully, without believing in ambushes, in brambles under the grass, in hot coals under the ashes, and which would gladly caress a viper, believing it to be only a snake. Open your eyes! That woman does not belong to the class of which she seems to be; her thumb has never been flattened on the thread of the spindle, and that little hand, softened by essences and pomades, has never worked. Her poverty is a disguise."