In the foremost chariot rode two men. One was King Diocles of Pherae. The other was the goodliest man mortal eye ever looked upon. A mane of fine-spun golden hair fell over the shoulders of his Sidonian robe; his face was like the sunshine, and his eyes were filled with the gladness of living. He was Paris, son of King Priam, and a prince of Troy. And his right hand gripped a shadow-casting spear. In the banquet hall, when the visitors and their host were seated, appeared Helen, the wife of Menelaus, with her little daughter, Hermione. When the cries of hunger and of thirst had died down, Helen addressed the strangers, asking no direct question--since to question a guest were discourteous--but saying that mayhap they would deign to explain who they were, and why they had come hither. Then arose Paris, standing by the board, facing the golden Helen. And he spoke winged words: It was prophesied at his birth, he began, that he would one day be the ruin of Troy. To prevent his living to fulfill his ordained fate, his father, King Priam--weeping at the deed's black necessity--had him borne to the lonely top of Mount Ida, there to die of exposure, or at the fangs of wild beasts. But a great she-bear, roaming the mountain crest, found the babe and brought him down to her cave, and there laid him among her own soft-coated young. Here he was found one day by herdsmen, among whom he grew up. In time he owned a herd. The best-loved of his cattle was a white bull, called The Star. Now it came to pass that King Priam, urged on by a dream, sent his slaves to Mount Ida's slopes to secure the finest bull that grazed there, for a sacrifice to Neptune. The slaves came upon The Star and drove him away with them. Paris gave chase, but in vain. Then he hastened to the city of Troy to beg redress from the king. And as he entered the outer gates of Priam's palace, his own sister, Cassandra, recognized him. Cassandra was a prophetess. Apollo had loved her, and, as a love gift, had endowed her with a gift of foretelling all things. But when she rejected his suit, he willed that while she might still retain the gift of prophecy, her forecasts should never be believed. So now her words were laughed to scorn. But Priam questioned the mountaineer. And, by the resemblance the youth bore to his father, and the ring that he still wore around his neck, where it had been placed when he had been taken up into the mountain as an infant, the king at last knew him. Great was his joy. And so, elevated to his rightful princely station, Paris passed the next few years, no longer in the harsh toil and on the poor fare of a herder, but as a king's son; wholly forgetting OEnone, the forest girl of Mount Ida whom he had wooed and won and deserted, and whom he to-day mentioned merely in the pride of a past conquest.