The Spartan Twins | Page 3

cloak.
The moment she heard the door move on its hinges, Lydia stood up straight and tall beside her hearth-fire, and, at a sign from her husband, came forward to greet the Stranger.
"You are welcome," she said, "to such entertainment as our plain house affords. I could wish it were better for your sake."
"I shall be honored by your hospitality," said the Stranger politely, "and what is good enough for a farmer is surely good enough for a philosopher, if I may call myself one."
"Though you are a philosopher, you are also, no doubt, an Athenian," replied Lydia, "and it is known to all the world that the feast of the Spartan is but common fare for those who live delicately as the Athenians do."
"I bring an appetite that would make a feast of bread alone," answered the Stranger.
Melas, a tall brown-faced man with a brown beard, now spoke for the first time.
"There is no haste, wife," he said. "The Stranger will spend the night under our roof. It is not yet late. While you get supper, we will rest beneath the olive trees and watch the sun go down behind the hills."
"Until I can better serve you, then," Lydia replied; and the two men went out again through the open door, and sat down upon a wooden bench which commanded a view of the little valley and the hills beyond.
Meanwhile, within doors, Lydia dropped the stately dignity of her company manners and became once more the busy housewife. When Chloe and Daphne returned from the spring, she had barley-cakes baking in the oven, and sausages were roasting before the hearth-fire. A kettle of broth steamed beside it.
"How good it smells!" cried Dion, when he came in with Argos from the farm-yard. "I could eat a whole pig myself. Do cook a lot of sausages, Mother. I am as hungry as a wolf."
"And you a Spartan boy!" said his Mother reprovingly. "You should think less of what you put in your stomach! Plain fare makes the strongest men. It is only polite to give a guest the best you have, but that's no excuse for being greedy and wanting to stuff yourself every day."
"Well, then," said Dion, "I wish Hermes, if he is the god who guides travelers, would bring them this way oftener. I'd like to be a strong man, but I like good things to eat, too, and when we have company, we have a feast."
His Mother did not answer him; she was too busy.
She sent Chloe to the closet for a jar of wine, and some goat's-milk cheese, and she herself went upstairs to get some dried figs from the store-room. Daphne followed Chloe to the closet, and for a moment there was no one beside the hearth-fire but Dion and Argos, and the sausages smelled very good indeed.
"I wonder if she counted them," thought Dion to himself, as he looked longingly at them. And then almost before he knew it himself he had snatched one of the sausages from the fire and had bitten a piece off the end! It was so very hot that it burned both his fingers and his tongue like everything, and when he tried to lick his fingers, he let go of the sausage, and Argos snapped it up and swallowed it whole. It burned all the way down to his stomach, and Argos gave a dreadful howl of pain and dashed through the door out into the farm-yard. Dion heard his Mother's footsteps coming down the stair. He thought perhaps he'd better join Argos.
When Lydia reached the hearth-fire once more, only Daphne was in the room. She set down the basket of figs and knelt to turn the sausages. She had counted them and she saw at once that one was missing. She was shocked and surprised, but she guessed what had become of it. Mothers are just like that. She rose from her knees and looked around for the culprit. She saw Daphne.
"You naughty boy!" she said sternly to Daphne. "What have you done with that sausage?"
"I didn't do anything with it; I never even saw it," cried poor Daphne. "And, besides that, I'm not a naughty boy. I'm not a boy at all! I'm Daphne!"
"Where's Dion, then?" demanded Lydia.
"I don't know where he is," said Daphne. "I didn't see him either, but I heard Argos howl as if some one had stepped on his tail. Maybe he took the sausage."
Lydia went to the door and looked out into the farm-yard. Away off in the farthest corner by the sheep-pen she saw two dark shadows.
"Come here at once," she called.
Dion and Argos both obeyed, but they came very slowly, and Argos had his tail between his legs. Lydia pointed to the fire.
"Where is the other sausage?" she inquired, with stern