[Illustration:  I’ll study hard and try to do you credit]

“I have no doubt as to your doing your best, my dear,” she said, “and it gives me great pleasure to do this for you.”

With that, said with a graceful softness which was charming, she made as if to rise, but Ellen still stood before her.  She had something more to say.  “If ever I am able,” she said—­“and I shall be able some day if I have my health—­I will repay you.”  Ellen spoke with the greatest sweetness, yet with an inflexibility of pride evident in her face.  Cynthia smiled.  “Very well,” she said, “if you feel better to leave it in that way.  If ever you are able you shall repay me; in the mean time I consider that I am amply paid in the pleasure it gives me to do it.”  Cynthia held out her slender hand to Ellen, who took it gratefully, yet a little constrainedly.

In the opposite corner the doll sat staring at them with eyes of blank blue and her vacuous smile.  A vague sense of injury was over Ellen, in spite of her delight and her gratitude—­a sense of injury which she could not fathom, and for which she chided herself.  However, Andrew felt it also.

After this surprising benefactress and Robert had gone, after repeated courtesies and assurances of obligation on both sides, Andrew turned to Fanny.  “What does she do it for?” he asked.

“Hush; she’ll hear you.”

“I can’t help it.  What does she do it for?  Ellen isn’t anything to her.”

Fanny looked at him with a meaning smile and nod which made her tear-stained face fairly grotesque.

“What do you mean lookin’ that way?” demanded Andrew.

“Oh, you wait and see,” said Fanny, with meaning, and would say no more.  She was firm in her conclusion that Cynthia was educating their girl to marry her favorite nephew, but that never occurred to Andrew.  He continued to feel, while supremely grateful and overwhelmed with delight at this good fortune for Ellen, the distrust and resentment of a proud soul under obligation for which he sees no adequate reason, and especially when it is directed towards a beloved one to whom he would fain give of his own strength and treasure.

As for Ellen, she was in a tumult of wonder and delight, but when she looked at the doll in her corner there came again that vague sense of injury, and she felt again as if in some way she were being robbed instead of being made the object of benefit.

After Ellen had gone to bed that night she wondered if she ought to go to college, and maybe gain thereby a career which was beyond anything her own loved ones had known, and if it were not better for her to go to work in the shop after all.

Chapter XXII

When Mrs. Zelotes was made acquainted with the plan for sending Ellen to Vassar she astonished Fanny.  Fanny ran over the next morning, after Andrew had gone to work, to tell her mother-in-law.  She sat a few minutes in the sitting-room, where the old lady was knitting, before she unfolded the burden of her errand.