Atossa, on the contrary, was more beautiful than ever, notwithstanding all she had suffered.  The refractory and impetuous child, the daring spirited girl, had developed into a dignified, animated and determined woman.  The serious side of life, and three sad years passed with her ungovernable husband and brother, had been first-rate masters in the school of patience, but they had not been able to alienate her heart from her first love.  Sappho’s friendship had made up to her in some measure for the loss of Darius.

The young Greek had become another creature, since the mysterious departure of her husband.  Her rosy color and her lovely smile were both gone.  But she was wonderfully beautiful, in spite of her paleness, her downcast eyelashes and languid attitude.  She looked like Ariadne waiting for Theseus.  Longing and expectation lay in every look, in the low tone of her voice, in her measured walk.  At the sound of approaching steps, the opening of a door or the unexpected tones of a man’s voice, she would start, get up and listen, and then sink back into the old waiting, longing attitude, disappointed but not hopeless.  She began to dream again, as she had been so fond of doing in her girlish days.

She was her old self only when playing with her child.  Then the color came back to her cheeks, her eyes sparkled, she seemed once more to live in the present, and not only in the past or future.

Her child was everything to her.  In that little one Bartja seemed to be still alive, and she could love the child with all her heart and strength, without taking one iota from her love to him.  With this little creature the gods had mercifully given her an aim in life and a link with the lower world, the really precious part of which had seemed to vanish with her vanished husband.  Sometimes, as she looked into her baby’s blue eyes, so wonderfully like Bartja’s, she thought:  Why was not she born a boy?  He would have grown more like his father from day to day, and at last, if such a thing indeed could ever be, a second Bartja would have stood before me.

But such thoughts generally ended soon in her pressing the little one closer than ever to her heart, and blaming herself for ingratitude and folly.

One day Atossa put the same idea in words, exclaiming:  “If Parmys were only a boy!  He would have grown up exactly like his father, and have been a second Cyrus for Persia.”  Sappho smiled sadly at her friend, and covered the little one with kisses, but Kassandane said:  “Be thankful to the gods, my child, for having given you a daughter.  If Parmys were a boy, he would be taken from you as soon as he had reached his sixth year, to be brought up with the sons of the other Achaemenidae, but your daughter will remain your own for many years.”

Sappho trembled at the mere thought of parting from her child; she pressed its little fair curly head close to her breast, and never found, fault with her treasure again for being a girl.