Slowly she sipped it, bringing herself to speech.
“Father, give me this cup to take with me.”
“You strange child. It is a common thing from the pottery under the hill.”
“It will be from home,” she faltered.
Nikander went off for reassurance to his Wife. “Will she be homesick, think you?” he asked.
Left alone, Theria stole away to look at the places that she must see no more—her father’s room, the aula, the balcony. She had to walk slowly, stately, in her robe. Already she seemed far away from the free, swift-moving Theria she had been. Last of all she came to the dusky old storeroom. Here, strangely enough, it was not its recent memories that came to her, but the memory of that far-off day when she had wept there as a child and had seen the nymphs and baby Hermes in the stream.
Then suddenly the sharp scent of violets met her—sweet, dewy, fresh, new. With a low cry she gathered the flowers from the floor; then, stumbling over her long robe, she hurried from the room.
The Nikander family left the house in silent procession. They were all crowned with laurel and carried with them the necessary things of sacrifice—the flat baskets with grain of barley, the torch lighted from their own dear hearth. Lycophron led the victim, a white goat whose gilded horns were crowned with flowers.
It was a solemn going. Theria had never thought that she could walk toward her beloved Precinct with so heavy a heart. A breeze, rare in summer, caught her festal skirts and fluttered them about her. Across the sky raced splendid clouds whose huge silver bulks but made loftier the blue sky-spaces between them. Midsummer had laid its silence on the morning birds but doves on her cousin Clitè’s roof cooed and strutted in the sunshine.
And now they had reached the Precinct. How easily the great gates opened to her this time. Did the keeper remember that other morning, she wondered? When he had refused to let her in?