LETTER LXXIV.

Dearest and Dearest:  So long as you are still this to my heart I trust to have strength to write it; though it is but a ghost of old happiness that comes to me in the act.  I have no hope now left in me:  but I love you not less, only more, if that be possible:  or is it the same love with just a weaker body to contain it all?  I find that to have definitely laid off all hope gives me a certain relief:  for now that I am so hopeless it becomes less hard not to misjudge you—­not to say and think impatiently about you things which would explain why I had to die like this.

Dearest, nothing but love shall explain anything of you to me.  When I think of your dear face, it is only love that can give it its meaning.  If love would teach me the meaning of this silence, I would accept all the rest, and not ask for any joy in life besides.  For if I had the meaning, however dark, it would be by love speaking to me again at last; and I should have your hand holding mine in the darkness forever.

Your face, Beloved, I can remember so well that it would be enough if I had your hand:—­the meaning, just the meaning, why I have to sit blind.

LETTER LXXV.

Dearest:  There is always one possibility which I try to remember in all I write:  even where there is no hope a thing remains possible:—­that your eye may some day come to rest upon what I leave here.  And I would have nothing so dark as to make it seem that I were better dead than to have come to such a pass through loving you.  If I felt that, dearest, I should not be writing my heart out to you, as I do:  when I cease doing that I shall indeed have become dead and not want you any more, I suppose.  How far I am from dying, then, now!

So be quite sure that if now, even now,—­for to-day of all days has seemed most dark—­if now I were given my choice—­to have known you or not to have known you,—­Beloved, a thousand times I would claim to keep what I have, rather than have it taken away from me.  I cannot forget that for a few months I was the happiest woman I ever knew:  and that happiness is perhaps only by present conditions removed from me.  If I have a soul, I believe good will come back to it:  because I have done nothing to deserve this darkness unless by loving you:  and if by loving you, I am glad that the darkness came.

Beloved, you have the yes and no to all this:  I have not, and cannot have.  Something that you have not chosen for me to know, you know:  it should be a burden on your conscience, surely, not to have shared it with me.  Maybe there is something I know that you do not.  In the way of sorrow, I think and wish—­yes.  In the way of love, I wish to think—­no.

Any more thinking wearies me.  Perhaps we have loved too much, and have lost our way out of our poor five senses, without having strength to take over the new world which is waiting beyond them.  Well, I would rather, Beloved, suffer through loving too much, than through loving too little.  It is a good fault as faults go.  And it is my fault, Beloved:  so some day you may have to be tender to it.