When Melas and the Stranger came in, they sat down side by side on the couch. Chloe knelt before them, took off their sandals, and bathed their feet. Then the Stranger loosened his long, cloak-like garment, and he and Melas reclined side by side upon the couch, their left elbows resting on the lamb's-wool cushions. Chloe moved the little table within easy reach of their hands, and Lydia took her place on the stool beside the couch. It was now quite dark except for the light of the hearth-fire. The Twins had been brought up to be seen and not heard, especially when there was company, and as Dion was not anxious to call attention to himself just then, the two children slipped quietly into their places on the floor by the hearth-fire just as Melas and the Stranger dipped their bread into their broth and began to eat. It must be confessed that Melas seemed to enjoy the black broth much more than his guest did, but the stranger ate it nevertheless, and when the last drop was gone, the men both wiped their fingers on scraps of bread and threw them to Argos, who snapped them up as greedily as if his tongue had never been burned at all. Then Chloe brought the sausages hot from the fire, and barley-cakes from the oven. When she had served the men and had explained that these cakes were really not so good as her barley-cakes usually were, Lydia gave the Twins each one, and she gave Daphne a sausage. She just looked at Dion without a single word. He knew perfectly well what she meant. He munched his barley-cake in mournful silence, and I suppose no sausage ever smelled quite so good to any little boy in the whole world as Daphne's did to Dion just then. However, there were plenty of barley-cakes, and his mother let him have honey to eat with them, which comforted Dion so much that when the Stranger began to talk to Melas, he forgot his troubles entirely. He forgot his manners too, and listened with his eyes and mouth both wide open until the honey ran off the barley-cake and down between his fingers. Then he licked his fingers! No one saw him do it, not even his Mother, because she too was watching the the inhabitants of the little farm. They lived so far from the sea, and so far from highways of travel on the island, that the Twins in all their lives had seen but few persons besides their own family and the slaves who worked on the farm. The Stranger was to them a visitor from another world--the great outside world which lay beyond the shining blue waters of the bay. They had seen that distant world sometimes from a hill-top on a clear day, but they had never been farther from home than the little seaport of Ambelaca two miles away. "How is it," the Stranger was saying to Melas, "that you, a Spartan, live here, so far from your native soil, and so near to Athens? The Spartans have but little love for the Athenians as a rule, nor for farming either, I am told."