_So wounded to his hut and wearily Came Menelaus; and he bowed his head Beneath the lintel neither fair nor high; And lo, queen Helen lay upon his bed, Flush’d like a child asleep, and rosy-red, And at his footstep did she wake and smile, And spake: “My lord, how hath thy hunting sped? Methinks that I have slept a weary while.”_[1] Lulled again by the arts of Aphrodite, Helen has completely forgotten all that has happened in the dreadful interval of the years since she last fell asleep at Lacedaemon. But Menelaus feels the fierce anger rise in his heart against her. He seizes and binds her, and carries her off to deliver her to the vengeance of the people. He reminds them of all they have endured and suffered, and calls upon them to mete to her the just death for such an one as she. But when the soldiers in their rage would have stoned her; when Menelaus rushed upon her with uplifted spear, Aphrodite drew the veil from before her matchless face. _And as in far-off days that were to be, The sense of their own sin did men constrain, That they must leave the sinful woman free Who, by their law, had verily been slain, So Helen’s beauty made their anger vain, And one by one their gathered flints let fall; And like men shamed they stole across the plain, Back to the swift ships and their festival._[1] So Helen went home to Lacedaemon again, the dear wife of Menelaus. And when we take up the second great Homeric epic, the _Odyssey_, we find her the serene and gracious hostess of young Telemachus. All the hateful past is purged away, and chaste as the moon-goddess, _Forth of her high-roofed, odorous chamber came Helen, like golden-shafted Artemis._[3] She still remembers the horror of those days; and when Menelaus is wondering who the stranger prince is who has sought their hospitality, Helen’s quick wit perceives how like he is to Odysseus. Is not this, she asks, the son whom Odysseus left in his house as a new-born child when the war began? “_And for the sake of me who knew not shame Under Troy town your host Achaean came._”[3] It is indeed the son of Odysseus; and by the irony of fate he has come to inquire from the very author of his sorrows, news of the father who, for aught Helen knows, has long ago been driven by Poseidon to the House of Hades. _Wept Argive Helen, child of Zeus, and wept Telemachus, and with him at the word Wept Menelaus._[3]