“But, Baltè, that’s only a play to make a holy memory to the god.” Theria felt sure of this, for not long ago her cousin had been the Sacred Boy in the play and she had heard Mother say that if Dryas continued to do so well in school, and if he grew graceful and fair, he, too, might some day be the “Boy of The Strepterion Drama.” She somehow felt sure that Dryas could not kill a real Python. But Baltè shook her head. “Don’t tell me!” she said stoutly. “Ye haven’t seen her. I have. I’ve seen the switch o’ the Python’s tail, an’ heard her teeth grind, the while she dies. An’ when she is dead, don’t they perform all the purifications just as when old mistress died in the house? She’s real, I tell ye!” Theria was more than half convinced. Yet even the Python and the boy-eating Lamia did not so strike terror to the childish Theria as did the strange rites which through winter months occupied the Delphians. These were no tales of the past but rites of Dionysos which Theria herself could see. * * * * * In the winter came Dionysos, a powerful god, to take possession of the Precinct while Apollo should be away in the north. Then Theban women—a large company—arrived in Delphi to greet him. Theria saw them pass and knew that a like company from Athens was arriving at the other end of the village. A society of Delphian ladies never else seen publicly came crowding out of their houses into the highway. From her favoured window Theria saw these also, her own kinswomen whom she knew well, no longer sedate and kind and neat, but with hair disordered, clad in strange spotted fawn skins over their chitons. They came leaping, shouting, whirling around in a sort of frenzy as though unable to wait for the rites which they were about to perform. They were no longer themselves, they were possessed by the strange god Dionysos. They were no longer called women, but Bacchantes. They were being swept along by a terrible joy from which the child shrank in shame though she could not understand. On one such evening Theria watched them, saw the chill, dusky street aflare with their torches, saw how the eyes of the Bacchantes caught the light, staring like the eyes of panthers. Then in a frenzied, noisy rout they rushed away. Theria sat by her window quivering while the cold yellow light died out on glen and mountain. Then quickly she left the window and stole down to the aula where she sat close to the Hestia fire. One of those first evenings of frost it was when instinctively men draw near to their hearth and wish to have about them the home faces and the comfortable voices of home. Yet the little girl knew that her Aunt Eunomia, her pretty cousin Clodora, and the rest, were speeding half-naked up Parnassos, there in the bitter uplands and the wild to rage madly to and fro at the will of the god. Lycophron burst into the room, rosy with the cold, rude as fourteen years could make him.