It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.  The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,—­there are reasons I could give you which settle all that matter.  I don’t wonder, however, that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.

I love you is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl’s eye or lip to the “I love you” in her heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No, women’s faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,—­Wordsworth might be one of them,—­spell out a portion of it from certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.  I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,—­all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them drunkards.

I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this young girl’s face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,—­only into feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of the next.

You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young girl’s face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler’s impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young girl’s face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.  No doubt your head aches,