ry all night to Mithra and Tishtrya, and to
sacrifice to them a white horse."

"Your Majesty always enlists the blessings of heaven for your servants,"
bowed Mardonius, as the company broke up and the king went away to his
inner tent and his concubines. Glaucon lingered until most of the grandees
had gone forth, then the bow-bearer went to him.

"Go back to my tents," ordered Mardonius; "tell Artazostra and Roxana that
all is well, that Ahura has delivered me from a great strait and restored
me to the king's favour, and that to-morrow the gate of Hellas will be
opened."

"You are still bloody and dusty. You have watched all last night and been
in the thick all day," expostulated the Athenian; "come to the tents with
me and rest."

The bow-bearer shook his head.

"No rest until to-morrow, and then the rest of victory or a longer one.
Now go; the women are consuming with their care."

Glaucon wandered back through the long avenues of pavilions. The lights of
innumerable camp-fires, the hum of thousands of voices, the snorting of
horses, the grumbling of camels, the groans of men wounded--all these and
all other sights and sounds from the countless host were lost to him. He
walked on by a kind of animal instinct that took him to Mardonius's
encampment through the mazes of the canvas city. It was dawning on him
with a terrible clearness that he was become a traitor to Hellas in very
deed. It was one thing to be a passive onlooker of a battle, another to be
a participant in a plot for the ruin of Leonidas. Unless warned betimes
the Spartan king and all who followed him infallibly would be captured or
slaughtered to a man. And he had heard all--the traitor, the discussion,
the design--had even, if without his choice, been partner and helper in the
same. The blood of Leonidas and his men would be on his head. Every curse
the Athenians had heaped on him once unjustly, he would deserve. Now truly
he would be, even in his own mind's eyes, "Glaucon the Traitor, partner to
the betrayal of Thermopylae." The doltish peasant, lured by the great
reward, he might forgive,--himself, the high-born Alcmaeonid, never.

From this revery he was shaken by finding himself at the entrance to the
tents of Mardonius. Artazostra and Roxana came to meet him. When he told
of the deliverance of the bow-bearer, he had joy by the light in their
eyes. Roxana had never shone in greater beauty. He spoke of the heat of
the sun, of his throbbing head.