Are not the die and the coin that comes from it only two sides of the same form?—­there is not a hair’s breadth anywhere between their surfaces where they lie, the one inclosing the other.  Yet part them, and the light strikes on them how differently!  That is a mere condition of light:  join them in darkness, where the light cannot strike, and they are the same—­two faces of a single form.  So you and I, dear, when we are dead, shall come together again, I trust.  Or are we to come back to each other defaced and warped out of our true conjunction?  I think not:  for if you have changed, if soul can ever change, I shall be melted again by your touch, and flow to meet all the change that is in you, since my true self is to be you.

Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake happy, either with or without thoughts of me?  I cannot understand, but I trust that it may be so.  If I could have a reason why I have so passed out of your life, I could endure it better.  What was in me that you did not wish?  What was in you that I must not wish for evermore?  If the root of this separation was in you, if in God’s will it was ordered that we were to love, and, without loving less, afterwards be parted, I could acquiesce so willingly.  But it is this knowing nothing that overwhelms me:—­I strain my eyes for sight and can’t see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight and am given great handfuls of darkness.  I said to you the sun had dropped out of my heaven.—­My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you?  Am I in the mold with my face to yours, receiving the close impression of a misery in which we are at one?  Are you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for me, as I now for you?

I wonder what, to the starving and drought-stricken, the taste of death can be like!  Do all the rivers of the world run together to the lips then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long deprivation ceases to be a want?  Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and thirst—­an antidote to it all?

I may know soon.  How very strange if at the last I forget to think of you!

LETTER LXVI.

Dearest:  Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need—­for the sake of you.  I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day as I received them.  Only one a day, so that I have still something left to look forward to to-morrow:  and oh, dearest, what unanswerable things they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!  There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it now feels and waits.

All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now:  only seems, dearest, for I still say, I do say that it is not so.  I know it is not so:  I, who know nothing else, know that!  So I look every day at one of these monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes reconciled with the pain that is there always.