of being a spy sent out
by the Trojans. But he had been in Lacedaemon, her own country, he said,
and could tell her about her father, if she were, as he supposed, the
beautiful Helen, and about her brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, and her
little daughter, Hermione.

'But perhaps,' he said, 'you are no mortal woman, but some goddess who
favours the Trojans, and if indeed you are a goddess then I liken you to
Aphrodite, for beauty, and stature, and shapeliness.' Then Helen wept;
for many a year had passed since she had heard any word of her father,
and daughter, and her brothers, who were dead, though she knew it not.
So she stretched out her white hand, and raised the beggar, who was
kneeling at her feet, and bade him follow her to her own house, within
the palace garden of King Priam.

Helen walked forward, with a bower maiden at either side, and the beggar
crawling after her. When she had entered her house, Paris was not there,
so she ordered the bath to be filled with warm water, and new clothes to
be brought, and she herself washed the old beggar and anointed him with
oil. This appears very strange to us, for though Saint Elizabeth of
Hungary used to wash and clothe beggars, we are surprised that Helen
should do so, who was not a saint. But long afterwards she herself told
the son of Ulysses, Telemachus, that she had washed his father when he
came into Troy disguised as a beggar who had been sorely beaten.

You must have guessed that the beggar was Ulysses, who had not gone to
Delos in his ship, but stolen back in a boat, and appeared disguised
among the Greeks. He did all this to make sure that nobody could
recognise him, and he behaved so as to deserve a whipping that he might
not be suspected as a Greek spy by the Trojans, but rather be pitied by
them. Certainly he deserved his name of 'the much-enduring Ulysses.'

Meanwhile he sat in his bath and Helen washed his feet. But when she had
done, and had anointed his wounds with olive oil, and when she had
clothed him in a white tunic and a purple mantle, then she opened her
lips to cry out with amazement, for she knew Ulysses; but he laid his
finger on her lips, saying 'Hush!' Then she remembered how great danger
he was in, for the Trojans, if they found him, would put him to some
cruel death, and she sat down, trembling and weeping, while he watched
her.

'Oh thou strange one,' she said, 'how enduring is thy heart and how
cunning beyond measure! How hast thou