“To take away my song! It wasn’t fair. No! To take away my song!” Nikander spoke passionately: “Theria, this was the happiest day of my life and you have made it the most sorrowful.” “Father!” she cried. “Father!” She stood instantly still. Tears were running down her face. “Oh, I was sorry the minute I had done it. There was no use to tell and it only gave pain to everyone.” Wistfully she tried to take his hand. Like most children, she had never told him how intensely she loved him. “I cannot understand, Theria, why you would give your song to Dryas and then at a crucial moment snatch it back again. Dryas has done wrong, but your wrong is sheer cruelty.” “But, Father——” she began. Then she stopped. She had done enough harm for one day. She could not tell him that she had never given the song, but that Dryas had taken it against her will. Dryas had come to her one morning with a song of his own. Theria knew at once that it would never win the prize. They had talked it over, trying to mend it. That afternoon her own song had flashed upon her. It was, as such flashes are apt to be, the culmination of long striving and dreaming. And for days afterward she had worked and perfected it. Then a week before the Pythian festival she had taken the song to Dryas and had sung it for him. Of course she was willing to give it to him. It did not occur to her but that Dryas would share with her the honour of it, at least in their own home. This Dryas had refused to do. They had quarrelled, and, at the end, Dryas had flatly told her that since she taught him the song he would take it for his own, whether she willed or no. He had thought she would never dare to tell. But now she had told, and the result was this misery. “Theria,” said her father wearily, “how did it ever occur to you to write a song?” “It was just as I told in the singing, Father. I was spinning alone in the spinning-room and the Muse struck across my mind. She would not let me go. The words hurried before I could catch up with them; a new chord waited for every chord I struck.” Nikander was for a moment awed. He believed in the Muse; no mere poetic figment was she. She was an accepted goddess, and even thus was she wont to act. “But you must have studied and worked,” he said. “You must have had help.” “Medon has helped me a little. He taught me the scales, and I have taken your book rolls and made him show me how to read. Do not be angry with Medon. He is only a slave and I commanded him. It was really myself did it. I worked very hard.” Suddenly it seemed to her that some invisible door, which ever for her, a girl, had always stood ajar, had quietly and irrevocably closed. She had the instinct to turn this way and that for escape. But there was no escape. “What shall I do?” she moaned. “Oh, what shall I do?” It seemed as though her father, so intelligent, so quick to help all comers to the Oracle, surely he would know some help for her.