The crowd had armed itself with stones as Agamemnon began to speak. But, as he denounced her, they were looking at her upturned face. And from their nerveless hands the stones fell to earth. They found her too beautiful for death.
Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:
"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"
But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.
For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at Sparta. And because the years were happy, both history and fable are silent about them, save that Menelaus was once more as slavishly enamored of his wife as in their first months together. Helen, too, was well content with this safe haven after her tempest-tossed decade—"Peace after war; port after stormy seas; rest after toil."
The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.
Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ashore, listening to the breakers; she was in their power. Her husband's protecting influence gone, she was at the mercy of his subjects; at the mercy of the merciless.
The women of Sparta banded together and, in dangerous silence, advanced upon the palace. These were the mothers, the wives, the daughters, the sweethearts, of men who had left their white bones on the Trojan seacoast, that the golden Helen might again rest snug in the shelter of Menelaus' love. There was not a doubt as to the militants' purpose. And as they drew near the palace, Helen fled. One or two slaves, still faithful to her, smuggled the fugitive out through a rear gateway and through the forests toward the seashore. There, a handful of silver bought a fisher's boat and the service of his crew.
And once more across the "wine-hued Ægean" fared the golden Helen, not this time in girlish light-heartedness to her husband's home, or, in guilty happiness, fleeing from that house by night with the man who had bewitched her, but a fugitive scourged forth from the only home she knew.
Storm-driven, her boat at last was blown ashore on the island of Rhodes. There she found she had been running toward ill fortune just as rapidly as she had thought she was running away from it. The Queen of Rhodes had lost a husband in the Trojan war. And, like every other woman on earth, she had sworn the vengeance oath against Helen. So, the story goes, when the fugitive was brought before the Rhodian queen, the latter gave a single curt order. In obedience to that fierce command, Helen was led forth and hanged; her executioners being blindfolded, that they might not balk at destroying the world's loveliest creation.