I remained for hours and did whatever silly pity could dictate:  but of course the young one died:  and I—­cleared away all remains that nobody might see!  And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance, but choice.  Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has never softened.  The question which pride of life and love of make-believe till then had not raised in me, “Am I a god to kill and to make alive?” was answered all at once by an emphatic “No,” which I never afterward forgot.  But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of three frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain and a last miserable dart away into the bright sunshine the spring work of two swift-winged intelligences.  Is man, we are told to think, not worth many sparrows?  Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it! and would in thought give my life that those swallows in their generations might live again.

Beloved, I am letting what I have tried to tell you of my childhood end in a sad way.  For it is no use, no use:  I have not to-day a glimmer of hope left that your eyes will ever rest on what I have been at such deep trouble to write.

If I were being punished for these two childish things I did, I should see a side of justice in it all.  But it is for loving you I am being punished:  and not God himself shall make me let you go!  Beloved, Beloved, all my days are at your feet, and among them days when you held me to your heart.  Good-night; good-night always now!

LETTER LXXIII.

Dearest:  I could never have made any appeal from you to anybody:  all my appeal has been to you alone.  I have wished to hear reason from no other lips but yours; and had you but really and deeply confided in me, I believe I could have submitted almost with a light heart to what you thought best:—­though in no way and by no stretch of the imagination can I see you coming to me for the last time and saying, as you only wrote, that it was best we should never see each other again.

You could not have said that with any sound of truth; and how can it look truer frozen into writing?  I have kissed the words, because you wrote them; not believing them.  It is a suspense of unbelief that you have left me in, oh, still dearest!  Yet never was sad heart truer to the fountain of all its joy than mine to yours.  You had only to see me to know that.

Some day, I dream, we shall come suddenly together, and you will see, before a word, before I have time to gather my mind back to the bodily comfort of your presence, a face filled with thoughts of you that have never left it, and never been bitter:—­I believe never once bitter.  For even when I think, and convince myself that you have wronged yourself—­and so, me also,—­even then:  oh, then most of all, my heart seems to break with tenderness, and my spirit grow more famished than ever for the want of you!  For if you have done right, wisely, then you have no longer any need of me:  but if you have done wrong, then you must need me.  Oh, dear heart, let that need overwhelm you like a sea, and bring you toward me on its strong tide!  And come when you will I shall be waiting.