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36 while the son who was to have killed his father was left to die in the wilderness.

Up to this moment we may suppose Œdipus to have been fully assured of his own innocence, and to have regarded the denunciation of Teiresias as the words of a madman or a traitor; but suddenly a chance expression of Jocasta causes a gleam of the real truth to flash across his mind. Where (he asks hurriedly and anxiously) was this spot "where three ways meet"? And the fatal answer comes—

Then Œdipus, his suspicions being thus confirmed, in an agony of doubt asks question after question of the queen. Time, place, circumstances, all agree. Link after link in the fatal chain of evidence is closed about him, and each answer only makes it clearer that the words of Teiresias have been all too true. The king in his turn recounts his flight from Corinth, in dismay at the hideous destiny foretold to him by the Delphic god. He tells how on his journey he came to a place where three roads met; how he had been pushed from the road by an old grey-haired man, riding in a chariot, attended by a herald and servants; how blows had followed the insult; and how he had "slain them all." And, oh! the mockery of fate—the fearful "irony" of his threatened vengeance! It is on his own head that he has invoked that binding and irrevocable curse, which would be executed to the full by