You love me!  Is it a question of little or much?  Is it not rather an entire new thought of me that has entered your life, as the thought of you entered mine months that seem years ago?  It was the seed then, and seemed small; but the whole life was there; and it has grown and grown till now it is I who have become small, and have hardly room in me for the roots:  and it seems to have gone so far up over my head that I wonder if the stars know of my happiness.

They must know of yours too, then, my Beloved:  they are no company for me without you.  Oh, to-day, to-day of all days! how in my heart I shall go on kissing it till I die!  You love me:  that is wonderful!  You love me:  and already it is not wonderful in the least! but belongs to Noah and the ark and all the animals saved up for an earth washed clean and dried, and the new beginnings of time which have ever since been twisting and turning with us in safe keeping through all the history of the world.

“We came over at the Norman conquest,” my dear, as people say trailing their pedigree:  but there was no ancestral pride about us—­it was all for the love of the thing we did it:  how clear it seems now!  In the hall hangs a portrait in a big wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a man who flouted the authority of James II. merely because he was so like my father in character that he could do nothing else.  I shall look for you now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong from your helmet down the middle of your face—­of which that line on your forehead is the remainder.  And you love me!  I wonder what the line has to do with that?

By such little things do great things seem to come about:  not really.  I know it was not because I said just what I did say, and did what I did yesterday, that your heart was bound to come for mine.  But it was those small things that brought you consciousness:  and when we parted I knew that I had all the world at my feet—­or all heaven over my head!

Ah, at last I may let the spirit of a kiss go to you from me, and not be ashamed or think myself forward since I have your love.  All this time you are thinking of me:  a certainty lying far outside what I can see.

Beloved, if great happiness may be set to any words, it is here!  If silence goes better with it,—­speak, silence, for me when I end now!

Good-night, and think greatly of me!  I shall wake early.

L.

Dearest:  Was my heart at all my own,—­was it my own to give, till you came and made me aware of how much it contains?  Truly, dear, it contained nothing before, since now it contains you and nothing else.  So I have a brand-new heart to give away:  and you, you want it and can’t see that there it is staring you in the face like a rose with all its petals ready to drop.