Now the house is empty, and your comings will be—­I cannot say more welcome:  but there will be more room for them to be after my own heart.

Heaven be over us both.  Faithfully your most loving.

LETTER LIII.

Beloved:  I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden last night when the spirit moved me there.  I had started for bed, but became sensitive of something outside not normal.  Whether my ear missed the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know.  To open the door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,—­where was I to put a foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness?  I hobbled out in a pair of my uncle’s.  I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here:  it becomes a garden of entombments.  Now and then some heap would shuffle feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be:  the Lawson cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free; and the silence was wonderful.  I padded about till I froze:  this morning I can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there.  The trees are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over:  but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted.  I take a breath back into last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I cannot explain.  If you had been there, even, I think I could have forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of solitude.  It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on the outer edge of the bell itself.  Across the park there are dead boughs cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.

I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience.  Such a good youth who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is now quite happy with a totally different sort of person.  I had a little letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event.  I thought it such a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances, however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.

With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no accidents on anybody’s line of life through a mistake in signals, or a flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility.  As for you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting before you sought for them.  “Oh, whistle, and I’ll come to you!” was their giveaway attitude.

I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy.  Good-by.  If you come you will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear barking behind the rhododendrons.—­So much your most loving.