The lady stood over her, laughing gently, and when the child looked
up at her, seemed much younger than she had at first, very young in
spite of her white hair. There was a soft red on her cheek; her lips
looked full and triumphant with smiles; her eyes were like stars. An
emotion of her youth which had never become dulled by satisfaction
had suddenly blossomed out on her face, and transformed it. An
unassuaged longing may serve to preserve youth as well as an
undestroyed illusion; indeed, the two are one. Cynthia Lennox looked
at the child as if she had been a young mother, and she her
first-born; triumph over the future, and daring for all odds, and
perfect faith in the kingdom of joy were in her look. Had she nursed
one child like Ellen to womanhood, and tasted the bitter in the cup,
she would not have been capable of that look, and would have been as
old as her years. She threw off her cloak and took off her bonnet,
and the light struck her hair and made it look like silver. A brooch
in the laces at her throat shone with a thousand hues, and as Ellen
gazed at it she felt curiously dull and dizzy. She did not resist at
all when the lady removed her little white shawl, but stared at her
with the look of some small and helpless thing in too large a grasp
of destiny to admit of a struggle. "Oh, you darling!" Cynthia Lennox
said, and stooped and kissed her, and half carried her into a great,
warm, dazzling room, with light reflected in long lines of gold from
picture-frames on the wall, and now and then startling patches of
lurid color blazing forth unmeaningly from the dark incline of their
canvases, with gleams of crystal and shadows of bronze in settings
of fretted ebony, with long swayings of rich draperies at doors and
windows, a red light of fire in a grate, and two white lights, one
of piano keys, the other of a flying marble figure in a corner,
outlined clearly against dusky red. The light in this room was very
dim. It was all beyond Ellen's imagination. The White North where