The hour has come for which she has waited so long: her desperate plan is formed: all that may have been needed to strengthen it has been heaped upon her in the pride and insolence of the king. But she must dissemble a little longer; she must force herself to speak lovingly, to appear faithful before the people, and to lull suspicion in Agamemnon’s mind. In her husband’s speech there had been a veiled menace: and now, after the first conventional phrases of affection, her words, too, take on a double meaning; and an undercurrent of bitter irony runs through them. On the surface lies the obvious meaning, to meet the exigency of the moment; just below it lay another sense, designed to leap to life and plead for her when the deed that she is contemplating shall be accomplished. “_There comes a time when all fear fades and dies. ... Does any heart but mine Know the long burden of the life I bore While he was under Troy?_“[14] The time has indeed come to put aside fear, but for a reason that these senators cannot see yet, any more than they can conceive the real nature of the burden that she had borne so long. To say that Clytemnestra’s speech is not really that of a faithful wife, that it is too loud in its protestations of joy, too insistent and eager in its avowal of fidelity, is beside the mark. For not only is Agamemnon in all probability aware of Clytemnestra’s sin, but she realizes that he may be aware of it. Hence the deep irony of the situation; and hence too the fact that these protestations, begun calmly and deliberately with the object of deceiving the crowd, gradually take on a different tone. The king’s manner to her from the moment of arrival had been cold, even repellent. The conviction grows that he has been forewarned, and with that conviction, the sense of danger to herself is heightened. As her speech proceeds we seem to feel her quickening pulse and tingling nerve, we seem to share the rush of fear that sweeps away restraint and carries her along a torrent of language that is wild, vehement, and almost frenzied. “_Now with heart at peace I hail my King, my watchdog of the fold, My ship’s one cable of hope, my pillar firm Where all else reels, my father’s one-born heir, My land scarce seen at sea when hope was dead, My happy sunrise after nights of storm, My living well-spring in the wilderness! Oh, it is joy, the waiting time is past! Thus, King, I greet thee home. No god need grudge— Sure we have suffered in time past enough— This one day’s triumph._“[14] At this point she seeks relief in action from the stress of emotion: