“I do, for the sake of my own distress over it,” Cynthia said, shortly.  “Suppose, now, we drop the subject, my dear.  There is a taint in the New England blood, and you have it, and you must fight it.  It is a suspicion of the motives of a good deed which will often poison all the good effect from it.  I don’t know where the taint came from.  Perhaps the Pilgrim Fathers’, being necessarily always on the watch for the savage behind his gifts, have affected their descendants.  Anyway, it is there.  I suppose I have it.”

“I am very sorry,” said Ellen.

“I also am sorry,” said Cynthia.  “I did you a wrong, and your mother a wrong, years ago.  I wonder at myself now, but you don’t know the temptation.  You will never know how you looked to me that night.”

Cynthia’s voice took on a tone of ineffable tenderness and yearning.  Ellen saw again the old expression in her face; suddenly she looked as before, young and beautiful, and full of a boundless attraction.  The girl’s heart fairly leaped towards her with an impulse of affection.  She could in that minute have fallen at her feet, have followed her to the end of the world.  A great love and admiration which had gotten its full growth in a second under the magic of a look and a tone shook her from head to foot.  She went close to Cynthia, and leaned over her, putting her round, young face down to the elder woman’s.  “Oh, I love you, I love you,” whispered Ellen, with a fervor which was strange to her.

But Cynthia only kissed her lightly on her cheek, and pushed her away softly.  “Thank you, my dear,” she said.  “I am glad you came and spoke to me frankly, and I am glad we have come to an understanding.”

Ellen, after she had taken her leave, was more in love than she had ever been in her life, and with another woman.  She thought of Cynthia with adoration; she dreamed about her; the feeling of receiving a benefit from her hand became immeasurably sweet.

Chapter XXIII

Ellen, under the influence of that old fascination which Cynthia had exerted over her temporarily in her childhood, and which had now assumed a new lease of life, would have loved to see her every day, but along with the fascination came a great timidity and fear of presuming.  She felt instinctively that the fascination was an involuntary thing on Cynthia’s part.  She kept repeating to herself what she had said, that she was not sending her to Vassar because she loved her.  Strangely enough, this did not make Ellen unhappy in the least, she was quite content to do all the loving and adoring herself.  She made a sort of divinity of the older woman, and who expects a divinity to step down from her marble heights, and love and caress?  Ellen began to remember all Cynthia’s ways and looks, as a scholar remembers with a view to imitation.  She became her disciple.  She began to move like Cynthia, and to speak like her,