Theria was heroic no longer. She ran to find Baltè.
“Baltè, dress me quick, quick,” she commanded. “No, in my festival dress, the white one with the purple-flowered border. And I want the lovely big necklace, too, with the golden shells and amethysts.”
Theria’s fingers trembled as she helped to fasten the robe.
“Eëtíon is coming,” she whispered. “Oh, he may be here any moment.”
But many moments passed and even hours. Theria went now to the upper window, now down to the door, thinking she had seen Eëtíon on the road, now back into the court.
“Why doesn’t he come?” she said despairingly. “Oh, he is against the colony. Father is trying to persuade him. That is what keeps them. It could be nothing else. Perhaps Eëtíon will not let me go at all.”
Theria had lived so long in half serfdom that she could not, save in certain burning moments, credit her freedom to do this thing. At last Baltè tried to persuade her to eat her breakfast.
“You are famished, darling,” quoth the nurse. “How pale you are. Your lover must not see you so pale.”
But Theria could not eat. She was sitting hopeless at the little table in the court when, with quiet suddenness, the door opened and Eëtíon was there. She rose, trembling, paler than ever. She did not move. Eëtíon ran to her.
“You are ill, darling? Why did you send for me? Ah, Theria, Theria, to see you, to see you!” And he kissed her again and again, so that she had no time to answer.
He had been out hunting, Eëtíon told her. He had returned to find the slave with her message. Oh, why had she given him this unlooked-for joy?
Then brokenly, trying not to plead either in voice or look, Theria told him of the colony and that her father wished to make her oekist—the leader of the colony.
“We must not go unless you wish to go, Eëtíon,” she finished. “It will mean hardships again for you, pioneer life away from your art and the beautiful things that are your very life. It would put you far from Hellas when you have had to wander so many years.”
For his sake she saw Inessa as it really was—a ruin on a desolate shore, a struggle for mere subsistence, a fight with Nature and with human foes.
But Eëtíon noted only one thing.
“You would be oekist?” he asked, amazed.
“Yes, you and I together.”
“They would place that great task in your hands? Would the priests really do that?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Oh,” he broke out. “It is better than anything I ever hoped for you. It is——”
She glanced up at him with such sudden relief that her eyes filled with tears.
“Look here, you little child,” spoke Eëtíon quickly. “What have you been thinking?”
“I thought——” Theria stopped.
“You thought I might take away your gift? That I, your lover, your betrothed, and therefore your lawful master, would snatch your freedom away?”
He took her right hand, holding it against his breast, now bending to kiss it.
“Theria,” he said soberly, “you haven’t begun to understand my love, not even begun to understand it.”
“Do you mean that you really wish me to reach out—to—to find joy in something beyond my home and children—beyond you, you, too?”
Eëtíon paused a moment in a sort of amazed impatience with her.
“Isn’t that what I have been telling you in as many ways as I knew how, ever since I first caught sight of you?” he inquired.
“I didn’t believe you.”
“Do you now?”
She looked, her eyes so deep with gratitude that he caught his breath.
“It will never be beyond you, Eëtíon. My whole life goes to you and there rests.”
“And you gave me my freedom. It’s there that my love rests.”
“But that was so easy to do. Who would not have done it?”
“Nobody but you, Theria. And with what quickness you did it, so spontaneously, so effectively—just you, you! Darling, I would live my life on a frozen coast if that were the only way to give you, too, the gift of freedom.”
“But you must be happy,” she insisted. “Can’t you see I cannot be glad unless——”
“Yes, yes, I am happy,” he interrupted her. “Theria, have you ever thought how humiliating it is to be a metic? In Argos I belonged to an honoured clan. Here in Delphi I am a metic, an alien, nor can I ever be otherwise. In the new city I will be a citizen—the first citizen of all.”
“Eëtíon!” she exclaimed.
He drew her close, speaking low and earnestly:
“And our children will be citizens also. They will inherit. In the new city my sons shall hold up their heads.”
When Nikander came in a half hour later he found the two lovers bending over a pottery tile on which was a map.
Theria leaped up, clapping her hands like a child.
“He will go, he will go,” she cried.
“Did I not tell you that he would?” answered Nikander quietly.