[For all her haste she cannot outrun a man whose fleet feet keep pace with a team of horses, and thus he soon makes disappear the distance between them. Her wish for space, that she might breathe without suffocating on his potent presence, this he tramples by reaching for her trembling hands and drawing her toward him, as carelessly as man might tread upon the flowers that crouch in the field through which he passes. His grip is gentle yet imploring as his eyes press into her and his words too.]

What mean you by such a question? Among all men there is none whom I love more dearly than the son of Menoetius - to me he is no less kin than mine own father. Am I to cast him out when he has just today come to this strange land and has no hearth but mine own by which to warm himself and make his bed? Had you but asked, I would have welcomed your daughter to share in whatever humble den we claim for our home, no matter that she is of another man's seed. Almighty Zeus, the protector of guests, demands that hospitality be given to strangers, but it ought to be ever more self-evident that man must provide for his family by any means he can.

[In this moment she seems a stranger in his eyes, just as she had on the night when she retrieved him from death's grim gates, when Koltira's glowing blade had rent his flesh but his own pride had carved a chasm between her and himself, which could be closed by neither his words nor hers. And so they had ceased speaking of it altogether, she in the hope that they would together fall back into place, and he in the belief that a wife would always worry after her husband but could not deter him from the path set before his feet. They had thus endured.

Yet now he is brought back to that howling silence in which he felt that he could not reach her. Away from the warmth of the tent he had built for them, even his broad shoulders draw inward to ward off the pervasive chill whose fingers seize him now that he runs no longer.]

Will you tell me why fall these tears down your fair cheeks?