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thing!”
    “But it is true,” the girl insisted.
    “Nonsense; if you ever say such a thing again,” said her mother crossly, “I shall beat you.” Kassandra was silent. What had happened had happened; she had no wish to be beaten, but she knew the truth and could not deny it. Why couldn’t her mother trust her? She always told the truth.
    She could not bear it, that her mother and the priestess should think she was lying, and as she went quietly, no longer protesting, down the long steps, her hand tucked tightly in the larger hand of the Queen, she clung to the face of Apollo, His gentle voice in her mind. Without her even being aware of it, something very deep within her was already waiting for the sound.

4
    AT THE NEXT full moon, Hecuba was delivered of a son, who was to be her last child. They named him Troilus. Kassandra, standing by her mother’s bed in the birth chamber, looking on the face of her small brother, was not surprised. But when she reminded her mother that she had known since the day of her visit to the Temple that the child would be a son, Hecuba sounded displeased.
    “Why, so you did,” she said angrily, “but do you really think a God spoke to you? You are only trying to make yourself important,” she scolded, “and I will not listen to it. You are not so little as that. That is a babyish thing to do.”
    But that, Kassandra thought angrily, was the important thing: she had known; the God had spoken to her. Did He speak to babies, then? And why should it make her mother angry? She knew the Goddess spoke to her mother; she had seen the Lady descend on Hecuba when she invoked Her at harvest time and in blessing.
    “Listen, Kassandra,” said the Queen seriously, “the greatest crime is to speak anything but the truth about a God. Apollo is Lord of the Truth; if you speak His name falsely, He will punish you, and His anger is terrible.”
    “But I am telling the truth; the God did speak to me,” Kassandra said earnestly, and her mother sighed in despair, for this was not an unknown thing either.
    “Well, I suppose you must be left to Him, then. But I warn you, don’t speak of this to anyone else.”
    Now that there was another prince in the palace, another son of Priam by his Queen, there was rejoicing through the city. Kassandra was left very much to herself, and she wondered why a prince should be so much more important than a princess. It was no use asking her mother why this should be so. She might have asked her older sister, but Polyxena seemed to care for nothing except gossip with the waiting-women about pretty clothes and jewelry and marriages. This seemed dull to Kassandra, but they assured her that when she was older she would be more interested in the important things of a woman’s life. She wondered why these should be so important. She was willing enough to look at pretty clothes and jewelry, but had no desire to wear them herself; she would as soon see them on Polyxena or her mother. Her mother’s waiting-women thought her as strange as she thought them. Once she had stubbornly refused to enter a room, crying out, “The ceiling will fall!” Three days later, there was a small earthquake and it did fall.
    AS TIME PASSED and season followed season, Troilus began first to toddle and then to walk and talk; sooner than Kassandra thought possible, he was almost as tall as she was herself. Meanwhile, Polyxena grew taller than Hecuba and was initiated into the women’s Mysteries.
    Kassandra longed fiercely for the time when she too would be recognized as a woman, though she could not see that it made Polyxena any wiser. When she had been initiated into the Mysteries, would the God speak again to her? All these years she had never again heard His voice; perhaps her mother was right and she had only imagined it. She longed to hear that voice again, if only to reassure herself it had been real. Yet her longing was tempered with reluctance; to be a woman, it seemed, was to change