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.
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