However, Ellen’s fondest new love was not for any of her little mates, but for her school-teacher.  To her the child’s heart went out in worship.  All through the spring she offered her violets—­violets gathered laboriously after school in the meadow back of her grandmother’s house.  She used to skip from hillock to hillock of marsh grass with wary steps, lest she might slip and wet her feet in the meadow ooze and incur her mother’s displeasure, for Fanny, in spite of her worship of the child, could speak with no uncertain voice.  She pulled up handfuls of the flowers, gleaming blue in the dark-green hollows.  Later she carried roses from the choice bush in the yard, and, later, pears from her grandmother’s tree.  She used to watch for Miss Mitchell at her gate and run to meet her, and seize her hand and walk at her side, blushing with delight.  Miss Mitchell lived not far from Ellen, in a tidy white house with a handsome smoke-tree on one side of the front walk and a willow with upside-down branches on the other.  Miss Mitchell had been born and brought up in this house, but she had been teaching school in a distant town ever since Ellen’s day, so they had never been acquainted before she went to school.  Miss Mitchell lived alone with her mother, who was an old friend of Mrs. Zelotes.  Ellen privately thought her rather better-looking than her own grandmother, though her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons.  Old Mrs. Mitchell might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her daughter in a district school.  She was a mountain of rotundity, a conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love.  Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful.  Mrs. Mitchell never failed to regale her with a superior sort of cooky, and often with a covert peppermint, and that although the Mitchells were not well off.  The old place was mortgaged, and Miss Mitchell had hard work to pay the interest.  Ellen had the vaguest ideas about the mortgage, and was half inclined to think it might be a disfiguring patch in the plastering of the sitting-room, which hung down in an unsightly fashion with a disclosure of hairy edges, and threatened danger to the heads underneath.