She raised the weight upon her back and head as she had been wont to do the weights of timber and of corn for the mill-house, and bore it onward.
In vain they remonstrated with her; she would not yield, but carried the wooden framework and the folded canvases all through the heat and weariness of the noonday.
"You would have me eat of your supper last night. I will have you accept of my payment to-day," she said, stubbornly.
For this seemed to her a labor innocent and just, and even full of honor, whatever men might say: had not Helios himself been bound as a slave in Thessaly?
They journeyed far that day, along straight sunlit highways, and under the shadows of green trees. The fields were green with the young corn and the young vines; the delicate plumes of the first blossoming lilacs nodded in their footsteps; the skies were blue; the earth was fragrant.
At noonday the players halted and threw themselves down beneath a poplar-tree, in a wild rose thicket, to eat their noonday meal of bread and a green cress salad.
The shelter they had chosen was full of fragrance from rain-drops still wet upon the grasses, and the budding rose vines. The hedge was full of honeysuckle and tufts of cowslips; the sun was warmer; the mild-eyed cattle came and looked at them; little redstarts picked up their crumbs; from a white vine-hung cottage an old woman brought them salt and wished them a fair travel.
But her heart was sick and her feet weary, and she asked always,—"Where is Paris?"
At last they showed it her, that gleaming golden cloud upon the purple haze of the horizon.
She crossed her hands upon her beating breast, and thanked the gods that they had thus given her to behold the city of his desires.