This time her word transported Penelope who leaped from the couch and clasped the old woman, crying shrilly through the tears that rained from her eyes: “Ah, dear mother, but tell me, tell me truly—if as you say he is really come home, how has he coped single-handed with the shameless suitors, who mobbed our house continually?” And the good nurse told her, “I did not see, I do not know: but I heard the groans of their slaying. We all shrank trembling into a corner of our safe room—its doors wedged fast—until your son Telemachus came and called me forth at his father’s bidding. There in the hall I found Odysseus, stalking amidst the bodies of his slain that littered the beaten floor. Your heart would have glowed to see him so lion-like, all battle-stained and steeped in blood. Now the corpses are piled up outside, by the courtyard gates, while he has had a great fire lighted and purges the lovely house. He sent me to summon you; so come, that at the end of all the sorrow you two may enter your hearts’ gladness hand in hand. Surely your lingering hope is now fulfilled. He reaches his fireside alive and finds you and your son still there; while upon each and every one of those suitors who served him ill in the house he has wreaked revenge.”

“Hush, mother,” said Penelope the decorous. “Do not sing too loud or soon. You know how grateful his reappearance in the house would be to everybody, particularly to me and to his son and mine: but what you proclaim does not ring true. This massacre of the overbearing suitors has been the work of some Immortal, inflamed by their heart-breaking wanton insolence which had regard for no soul they met, neither the bad nor the good: so they have been punished according to their sins. But meantime Odysseus in some far land has lost his way to Achaea—yea, lost himself.” Nurse Eurycleia replied: “My child, why let fall that dull word of your husband’s never coming home, when he is here already and by his fireside? Your heart was always stubborn in unbelief. Why I can quote you a sure proof, that scar from the boar’s white tusk long years ago, which I noted as I washed him. I wanted to tell you upon the instant; but he, careful for his own interests put his hand over my jaw and silenced me. Come with me now—and I pledge my life on it. If I mislead you, then slay me by the meanest death you know.”