“I have been long without food,” she confided to him now. “I ran away before dawn and I never thought to eat. I walked up into the sanctuary and saw all the gods and temples and golden tripods. Oh, if they take me home and whip me now and put me in the dark, they can never take that away from me.”
“Whip—great Zeus, who would dare do that!”
“No one, no one,” she quickly answered. “Of course, that was only jest.”
But his eyes still held the horror of it as he watched her.
“Do you know,” she said, as she finished the last morsel, “this bread has given me all the rest of my precious day. With my hunger I would have had to go home.”
“May it give you your hours,” said the slave devoutly. “You who are giving me a life of freedom.”
Something in his manner of speech caught her notice. It was well tuned and he used quaint words which she had never heard before.
“You have not always been a slave,” she concluded.
“No, Despoina, that is why it is so hard to be a slave. And when I saw the years ahead once more I cursed the gods. Then you came, and I thought you were Athena come to punish me for the cursing. Even now, dear lady, I would not be amazed if you were to grow suddenly tall and rise upward through the trees.”
He made an eloquent gesture. Then his eyes grew fixed, staring at a place up the hill.