The dance ends and for the first time the audience broke into enthusiastic applause. Nothing so beautiful had ever been witnessed in Westhaven!
Penelope and her maidens return to the palace. Later Odysseus wanders into his own home, unrecognized by his family and friends.
The Girl Scouts composed the household of Penelope, the Boy Scouts found their opportunity as the impatient suitors of the lady Penelope. They remain about her palace, playing at games, feasting and wasting her substance and that of her son, Telemachus. The hour must be near when she shall make up her mind who is to fill the place of her lost husband, Odysseus.
In the games that took place the Boy Scouts found their chance to exhibit their prowess in outdoor sports.
Penelope fetches the bow and the quiver full of deadly arrows. She then goes to meet the princes, her attendants following carrying the axes.
To the suitor who wins at the trial of the bow Penelope vows to give herself in marriage.
Odysseus, with as little trouble as a minstrel fits a new cord to his lyre, bends the mighty bow with an arrow caught up from the table at his side.
Even when the bronze-tipped shaft goes clean through twelve axes set up in a row, the blinded Penelope fails to know her lord.
The last scene reveals Odysseus, his shabby coat cast aside, his figure no longer bent and aged, a shining hero seated opposite Penelope in the courtyard of his home, united at last after long parting.
The Greek tableaux were over. Within a quarter of an hour the audience departed for their homes, the Girl Scouts to their own camp and the boys to theirs on the other side of the hill. Yet not until bed-time was any other subject discussed by the players and their audience than the surprising success of the Greek pageant given that afternoon in the familiar setting of the New England woods.