The Precinct, the beloved Precinct itself, where men brought grateful gifts to the god. What a mockery! Were these wistful worshippers all deceived? Did Apollo sit in Olympos and _laugh_ at them? And Theria was wretchedly lonely. Hour-long, hour-long, with nothing to do, not even spinning. The home faces, home voices, not a thousand paces distant, were all to her as far as the pillars of Heracles. Farther—farther! for it is conceivable that loved ones might return thence, but her dear ones could not come to her. And while she sat mid the windowless walls there happened without her knowledge the most glorious single deed of Greece. Sparta was ever grudging. She did not much care to bar the Persians out of all Greece. She would have preferred to meet them on the borders of her own Lakonia. If all her sister states should then perish why should Sparta care? But one Spartan cared supremely to keep them out of Greece. Her king, Leonidas. So Leonidas, with the few soldiers which the Ephors grudgingly allowed him, marched for Thermopylæ. Nikander, Lycophron, Dryas, Eëtíon—all the men of Delphi—saw one day the file of bronze-clad soldiers coming up the Delphi road, led by the twinkling flame of their sacred fire. They came with set faces under their helmets, their new polished shields glancing in the sun. They paused only to do honour to Apollo, then moved onward up the Parnassian road. Three hundred men and a few timid allies to meet a million Persians at the narrow pass! Those who saw them never forgot them. Nor has the world forgot. But Theria within her walls knew nothing of these things. Theria had come upon a new dilemma. The day of oracle came around again. Aristonikè was too ill for the tripod. Theria must serve again. Of course she would not deceive again. Indeed she had no knowledge with which to deceive. Besides, she had determined that she would never again speak upon the tripod. She wanted to cry out against it, to tell the world what a mummery it was. Yet in spite of all this she was compelled to undergo the preparatory rites. She had to fast, chew the laurel, pass through the smoke. When she did not go into the trance, they tried her over and over again until she was well-nigh dead. “I knew she could not do it,” she heard old Tuchè saying in the court. “What ’mazes me is that she went under the first time. She’s not the kind for a pythoness.” Well, then, they would cast her aside, and for Theria they could not do so too soon. Then her life would be spent in the Pythia House. She thought of her lover and of the rich life that might have been hers, even of the “glorious children” that her father had spoken of. But now she would be but a useless vessel, cast aside. Theria had no joy in her helpful Athenian oracle. Her whole world was overshadowed because her god was gone.