They bit their lips and frowned for anger, to be checked so by a youth; nevertheless for that time they had the grace to abstain, either for shame, or that Minerva had infused into them a terror of Ulysses’s son.

So that day’s feast was concluded without bloodshed, and the suitors, tired with their sports, departed severally each man to his apartment.  Only Ulysses and Telemachus remained.  And now Telemachus, by his father’s direction went and brought down into the hall armour and lances from the armoury:  for Ulysses said, “On the morrow we shall have need of them.”  And moreover he said, “If any one shall ask why you have taken them down, say, it is to clean them and scour them from the rust which they have gathered since the owner of this house went for Troy.”  And as Telemachus stood by the armour, the lights were all gone out, and it was pitch-dark, and the armour gave out glistening beams as of fire, and he said to his father, “The pillars of the house are on fire.”  And his father said, “It is the gods who sit above the stars, and have power to make the night as light as the day.”  And he took it for a good omen.  And Telemachus fell to cleaning and sharpening of the lances.

Now Ulysses had not seen his wife Penelope in all the time since his return; for the queen did not care to mingle with the suitors at their banquets, but, as became one that had been Ulysses’s wife, kept much in private, spinning and doing her excellent housewiveries among her maids in the remote apartments of the palace.  Only upon solemn days she would come down and shew herself to the suitors.  And Ulysses was filled with a longing desire to see his wife again, whom for twenty years he had not beheld, and he softly stole through the known passages of his beautiful house, till he came where the maids were lighting the queen through a stately gallery, that led to the chamber where she slept.  And when the maids saw Ulysses, they said, “It is the beggar who came to the court to-day, about whom all that uproar was stirred up in the hall:  what does he here?” But Penelope gave commandment that he should be brought before her, for she said, “It may be that he has travelled, and has heard something concerning Ulysses.”

Then was Ulysses right glad to hear himself named by his queen, to find himself in no wise forgotten, nor her great love towards him decayed in all that time that he had been away.  And he stood before his queen, and she knew him not to be Ulysses, but supposed that he had been some poor traveller.  And she asked him of what country he was.

He told her (as he had before told to Eumaeus) that he was a Cretan born, and however poor and cast down he now seemed, no less a man than brother to Idomeneus, who was grandson to king Minos, and though he now wanted bread, he had once had it in his power to feast Ulysses.  Then he feigned how Ulysses, sailing for Troy, was forced by stress of weather to put his fleet in at a port of Crete, where for twelve days he was his guest, and entertained by him with all befitting guest-rites.  And he described the very garments which Ulysses had on, by which Penelope knew that he had seen her lord.