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,
though she did not know it. Her imitation was totally unconscious;
indeed, it was hardly to be called imitation; it was rather the
following out of the leadi