“All I believed is true! 
       I am able yet
       All I want to get
     By a method as strange as new: 
     Dare I trust the same to you?”

Fate says, then, you are to be my friend.  Fate has said I am yours already.  That is very certain.  Only in real life where things come true would a book have opened as this has done.

G.

Dear Highness:  I am sure now, then, that I please you, and that you like me, perhaps only a little:  for you turned out of your way to ride with me though you were going somewhere so fast.  How much I wished it when I saw you coming, but dared not believe it would come true!

“Come true”:  it is the word I have always been writing, and everything has:—­you most of all!  You are more true each time I see you.  So true that now I will write it down at last,—­the truth for you who have come so true.

Dear Highness and Great Heart, I love you dearly, though you don’t know it,—­quite ever so much; and am going to love you ever so much more, only—­please like me a little better first!  You on your dear side must do something:  or, before I know, I may be wringing my hands all alone on a desert island to a bare blue horizon, with nothing in it real or fabulous.

If I am to love you, nothing but happiness is to be allowed to come of it.  So don’t come true too fast without one little wee corresponding wish for me to find that you are!  I am quite happy thinking you out slowly:  it takes me all day long; the longer the better!

I wonder how often in my life I shall write down that I love you, having once written it (I do:—­I love you! there [it] is for you, with more to follow after!); and send you my love as I do now into the great emptiness of chance, hoping somehow, known or unknown, it may bless you and bring good to you.

Oh, but ’tis a windy world, and I a mere feather in it:  how can I get blown the way I would?

Still I have a superstition that some star is over me which I have not seen yet, but shall,—­Heaven helping me.

And now good-night, and no more, no more at all!  I send out an “I love you” to be my celestial commercial traveler for me while I fold myself up and become its sleeping partner.

Good-night:  you are the best and truest that I ever dreamed yet.

H.

Dear Highness:  I begin not to be able to name you anything, for there is not a word for you that will do!  “Highness” you are:  but that leaves gaps and coldnesses without end.  “Royal,” yet much more serene than royal:  though by that I don’t mean any detraction from your royalty, for I never saw a man carry his invisible crown with so level a head and no haughtiness at all:  and that is the finest royalty of look possible.