He sat down on a stone bench lifting Dryas to his knee, but Theria crept into the hollow of his arm. Her fears took flight like scattered birds. No harm could come to Dryas now that her father was there. “And what day, think you, is this?” he asked. Birthdays were not so important in those days and the children did not know. “It is Dryas’s birthday,” he told them. “Then my birthday, too,” exclaimed Theria, for though she was taller and seemed older than her brother, she was his twin. “Yes, yours, too.” Quite unconscious of his act, Nikander bent and kissed the little girl. So bending, his face was the mature model for her own. “And because it is the seventh birthday it is to be the first day of school. Medon will take you, Dryas. He will be pedagogue. And here is your little lyre. Father bought it to-day of the old lyre maker. See what a pretty picture is here beneath the strings. And for you, my daughter, what you have wanted so long.” He drew from behind the bench the ropes and seat of a swing. “But I wanted a lyre, too,” said Theria with wide, blank eyes. “A lyre for a little girl! Oh, no, kitten. Besides, did you not ask for a swing?” “But, oh, Father, it is the lyre I want.” “Theria must not be envious,” said her father seriously. “That would be a new fault in my little girl.” But her wide, astonished eyes disturbed him and again he kissed the child before he hurried out. Dryas with little cluckings of delight plucked at his toy, but Theria stood very still. Since she was to have no lyre, was it also true that she was not to go to school? She seemed in the presence of a calamity which had been approaching since all the days she had been alive, and now was come. With the vagueness of her seven years, yet very deeply, she knew that not going to school meant the parting of the ways between her and Dryas, the closing away from her of precious things. Yet, strangely enough, in her surface, childish self, she did not believe it at all. Father had not said she could not go. Besides, she had always got what she wanted if she persisted. She knew from her big brother Lycophron what the school was like—a room or portico up near the Precinct, the master teaching Homer all the day long—wonderful stories which one could not forget, boys playing their lyres merrily then hanging them upon the wall to go out and leap and race in contest in the sunshine. Lycophron had gone to school since the beginning of the world. Theria did not associate Baltè’s warning with this matter at all. “I go to school to-day,” she began to say softly to herself. “Then I must hurry.” With a certain anxiety she crossed the court to Lycophron’s room. Yes, there on the chest were his extra stylus and tablets and hanging on the wall a small lyre which in a temper he had broken. Theria climbed the chest and got it.