smiled and went off, looking back at us, I thought,
half-enviously.

We went and sat down on the seat, and Cynthia said:

"Something has happened to you, dear one, I see, since I saw you
last--something great and glorious."

"Yes," I said, "you are right; I have seen the beginning and the end;
and I have not yet learned to understand it. But I am the same, Cynthia,
and yours utterly. We will speak of this later. Tell me first what has
happened to you, and what this place is. I will not waste time in
talking; I want to hear you talk and to see you talk. How often have I
longed for that!"

Cynthia took my hand in both of her own, and then unfolded to me her
story. She had lived long in the forest, alone with the child, and then
the day had come when the desire to go farther had arisen in his mind,
and he had left her, and she had felt strangely desolate, till she too
had been summoned.

"And this place--how can I describe it?" she said. "It is a home for
spirits who have desired love on earth, and who yet, from some accident
of circumstance, have never found one to love them with any intimacy of
passion. How strange it is to think," she went on, "that I, just by the
inheritance of beauty, was surrounded with love and the wrong sort of
love, so that I never learned to love rightly and truly; while so many,
just from some lack of beauty, some homeliness or ungainliness of
feature or carriage, missed the one kind of love that would have
sustained and fed them--have never been held in a lover's arms, or held
a child of their own against their heart. And so," she went on smiling,
"many of them lavished their tenderness upon animals or crafty servants
or selfish relations; and grew old and fanciful and petulant before
their time. It seems a sad waste of life that! Because so many of them
are spirits that could have loved finely and devotedly all the time. But
here," she said, "they unlearn their caprices, and live a life by
strict rule--and they go out hence to have the care of children, or to
tend broken lives into tranquillity--and some of them, nay most of them,
find heavenly lovers of their own. They are odd, fractious people at
first, curiously concerned about health and occupation and one can often
do nothing but listen to their complaints. But they find their way out
in time, and one can help them a little, as soon as they begin to
desire to hear something of other lives but their own. They have to
learn to turn l