“I had almost forgotten I was young. I had kept that disguise so long. And how I hated it—the dirt, the miserable matted beard, the stooping. It took me days to stand straight again.” “Was it not bad enough to be a slave without making yourself like that?” said Theria disgustedly. “Dear maid, I had to keep so. They would certainly have sold me into Persia. There is great price in the East for beautiful men.” He said this frankly of himself as a matter of course. Indeed there was something startling in his beauty—an ethereal quality, though he was manly too, but now so full of delight that he seemed like a child. He began hurriedly to tell her of himself. “Dear lady, I was not born a slave. You will believe that. I was taken at sea by pirates—the whole ship seized. They put us below in the dark hold of their ship and fed us on nuts. That first night I blacked my face with the nut-hulls. I exchanged garments with the meanest man among us. I——” “But why?” asked Theria. “I had heard the sea-robbers upon deck above talking of me—and how they would sell me to the Persian Court.” A horror crossed the youth’s sensitive face. “Lady,” he said, “the Persians would have shamed me and made me worse than slave. I would do anything to escape that. In the morning, when the pirates came down looking for me, they thought their beautiful youth had jumped overboard. Stupid Phœnicians.” This Odyssey was holding Theria fascinated. She forgot all the proprieties. She forgot that the youth might be love-making. Her mind had moved so many days in a doomed circle that now it spread wings of new life. “But you got home again. How ever did you manage that?” she questioned. “For long I was a galley slave. But one day, when the ship stopped at Corinth, I won the captain’s attention and told him of my skill in making gods of stone. Then he sold me to an image maker, and the image maker again to the owner of the pottery here. Oh, those days at the pottery! Those endless days! The dirt, the sweat, the low talk, the beatings if work was not swift enough. For I was not a swift worker. I had to make even those poor slight drawings as beautiful as I could. My only life was in them. I would dream over them. Then the overseer would beat me. But those days are over. Think of it, lady. Can you think how happy I am being away from that?” “Great Hermes, yes! And then you went up the Precinct with my jewels?” “Yes, blessed one. The next morning after you gave me them the good god freed me. I came down out of the Precinct gate knowing that I was free. I went straight to Argos. I think I sang all the way. Argos is my home.”