So well did the sequestered situation serve them that their enemy, the Catanan neighbours, found them not until months had passed. And when they did find them, the new colonists drove them off in a quick fight.
Theria’s hours were full. Those hours which at home used to drag in hated vacancy. The colonists themselves were Theria’s constant care. To one she gave ardent praise, to another, merited rebuke.
The choosing of laws, the unexpected setting aside of old laws which in this new land were found to be ill-fitted, the keeping of the council high purposed and pure. These were her duties. Theria did not sit with the council, but her advice was paramount. As former priestess of Apollo and seer of a vision, she exercised a power which as mere woman she could never have attained.
And strangely enough, her poet quality did not suffer in this public activity, but, as is frequent with the Greek, rather thrived and flowered in it.
Late in the winter her first child was born. The colonists thought it was misfortune that the child should be a girl. But Eëtíon took this dispensation of the gods with good heart. He lifted the darling creature in his arms, gazing into the tiny face which, from its first hour, knew how to smile.
Then, smiling himself, he draped the little thing in a long, old-fashioned string of pearls and laid her softly beside her mother.
“But what is this?” asked Theria. “In what strange fashion have you decked my child?”
He laughed with happiness. “Do you not recognize them, dear Theria? The jewels of my freedom which your eldest daughter must wear. Did I not purchase them from Apollo and bring them over seas in hope of her?”
And Theria realized how Eëtíon loved his little girl.
In the second spring came a shipload of Athenians to join the colony. They gave the town a new impress from the first moment of arrival. For who should arrive with them but Nikander himself.