The words escaped the door of her lips. She was aghast at the net of lies closing about her. Of course if she should tell her father it was prophecy he would believe. But she would not lie to him, not even—— She did not know that as she thought these things guilt stood manifest in her face. Nikander caught her arm, roughly, asking the thing he did not want to know—the thing he had been suspecting for many days. “Theria, your Athenian oracle—Great Zeus in Olympos, have you deceived in all your oracles?” She sank in a heap on the floor. “Father, Father; the need! It was such bitter need—and no ecstasy would come. The Athenians—the—the——” Her weeping choked her speech. Nikander was too horrified to answer. With hand before his eyes he kept repeating: “Great heaven! great heaven!” Suddenly he lifted his head again. “If the oracle is not from the god, why, in Zeus’s name, this pother about it—the words of a girl?” “Father—but it is important. The Athenians will offer true sacrifice to the winds. They will be hopeful in their prayers, in their fighting. The oracle gladdens the fighters.” But Nikander’s mind had never left his sons. “Theria, who told you this vile tale about your brothers?” he asked. “I cannot tell you. I——” “If it were from some good source, you would tell me.” Theria dragged herself up to her knees. “It was a good source. Oh, Father, the truest, the best, the kindest.” Poor Theria; even to speak of her lover set her white face aflame. But Nikander was pushing further. “Theria, I begin to believe what the slaves have been telling in the household, that you have a lover. Now do not lie to me. Your lover brought you this news.” Theria was utterly broken down. She could only moan, “But he told me the truth. He told me in order to save them. He told me because he loves my house and you and he wants to save us from ruin.” “Great Paian, what a heap of sins on one girl’s head! She has deceived on the tripod, not once, but twice. She has a lover—she a priestess of Apollo. Now she has fled the Pythia House (which she ought never to have left) to bring a monstrous lie against her brothers.” To Nikander the shock of all this was terrible beyond belief. But worst of all, he feared that the vile tale about his sons was true. Oh, if he could crush that fear out of his mind. It must not be true. It could not—— He paced up and down the room beating his hands together weeping, sobbing, as only those can who, but once in a lifetime, give way to grief. “My children all against me. But no, it cannot be true. Ruin for them, ruin for me. It cannot be. No!” Theria crept weakly to her feet and followed him, but as she touched him he reeled from her. “Don’t touch me!” he cried. Suddenly his agony was transformed to anger. “You—you—tell that tale, oh, how easily! It is not true. Leave me. I am beside myself. Your sins are more than I can bear. And now you add yet more. You will ruin my sons.” “Father, Father,” she pleaded.