“I can go to her grave again and see the violets all around it, their exquisite odour made of her dust.  I can carry to her the first roses of June, as I used to do, but she cannot take them in her still hands.  I can only lay them on that impassable mound, and let the warm rains, as soft as woman’s tears, drip down and down and down until the fragrance and my love come to her in the mist.

“But will she care?  Is that last sleep so deep that the quiet heart is never stirred by love?  When my whole soul goes out to her in an agony of love and pain, is it possible that there is no answer?  If there is a God in heaven, it cannot be!”

“October fifth.  Night.

“It is said that Time heals everything.  I have been waiting to see if it were so.  Day by day my loss is greater; day by day my grief becomes more difficult to bear.  I read all the time, or pretend to.  I sit for hours with the open book before me and never see a line that is printed there.  Oh, Love, if I could dream to-night, in the earth with you!”

“October seventh.

“Just four months ago to-day!  I was numb, then, with the shock and horror.  I could not feel as I do now.  When the tide of my heart came in, with agony in every pulse-beat, it rose steadily to the full, without pause, without rest.  I think it has reached its flood now, for I cannot endure more.  Will there ever be recession?”

“November tenth.

[Sidenote:  Death of Passion]

“I am coming, gradually, to have some sort of faith.  I do not know why, for I have never had it before.  I can see that all things made of earth must perish as the leaves.  Passion dies because it is of the earth, but does not love live?

[Sidenote:  A Gift]

“If only the finer things of the spirit could be bequeathed, like material possessions!  All I have to leave my son is a very small income and a few books.  I cannot give him endurance, self-control, or the power to withstand temptation.  I cannot give him joy.  If I could, I should leave him one priceless gift—­my love for Constance, to which, for one hour, hers answered fully—­I should give him that love with no barrier to divide it from its desire.

“I wonder if Constance would have left hers to her little yellow-haired girl?  I wonder if sometimes the joys of the fathers are not visited upon their children as well as their sins?”

“November nineteenth.  Night.

“I have come to believe that love never dies for God is love, and He is immortal.  My love for Constance has not died and cannot.  Why should hers have died?  It does not seem that it has, since to-day, for the first time, I have found surcease.

“Constance is dead, but she has left her love to sustain and strengthen me.  It streams out from the quiet hillside to-night as never before, and gives me the peace of a benediction.  I understand, now, the blinding pain of the last five months.  The immortal spirit of love, which can neither die nor grow old, was extricating itself from the earth that clung to it.