One morning the Trojans awoke to find that all the Greeks had sailed away. Their huts stood abandoned on the beach, their ships were nowhere visible on the horizon. Coming back, rejoicing, to the city, the scouting party that brought this joyous news found a monstrous wooden horse. They thought that the Greeks had built it and left it there, to propitiate Neptune for a speedy and safe voyage back to their native chores. The Trojans bore the horse within the city's walls, to keep it as a memento of the great war. Helen, passing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest massacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept, women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were slaughtered like sheep. Then the torch was applied, and all Troy was burned to ashes. Helen was saved from death by Ulysses, who took her to Menelaus and demanded kindly treatment for her, pleading in her behalf that she had at the last betrayed the Trojans by setting free the Greeks within the wooden horse. There was no need for his mediation. No man could harbor wrath against the golden Helen. Menelaus, at the very first meeting of their eyes, forgave and forgot. He opened his arms and his heart to the woman who had wrecked his life and who had brought to death thousands of gallant men. Back to Greece he bore her; back to Sparta, where he installed her once more as his queen. He had first brought her hither in triumph as a mere slip of a girl, to people who had received her with pride. Now she came to Sparta again, a woman of over fifty, to a populace who cursed and reviled her. Widowed wives and weeping mothers spat at her as she passed them on the way to the palace. But none of this was as hard to bear as had been Agamemnon's parting words--spoken in her presence--to the Greek army on the shores of Ilium. Though his brother was minded to forgive, Agamemnon was not. And to the assembled host he had shouted: "O ye who overlong have borne the yoke, behold this woman, the very fountain of your sorrows! For her ye left your dear homes long ago, but now the black ships rot from stern to prow, and who knows if ye shall see your own again? Aye, and if homes ye win, ye yet may find--ye that the winds waft and the waters bear--that you are quite gone out of mind. Your fathers, dear and old, died dishonored there; your children deem ye dead, and will not share their lands with you; on mainland or on isle, strange men are wooing now the women you wedded. For love doth lightly beguile a woman's heart.