en try for leave to see!
The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work,
which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes
and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, under eternally
dreaming skies.

Well, Brian tells me that going back as a blind man to the old scenes,
he had a strange, thrilling sense of _seeing_ them--seeing more clearly
than before those effects of mysterious beauty, hovering with prophecy
above the squalor of mud and blood, hovering and mingling as the faint
light of dawn mingles, at a certain hour, with the shadows of night.
People used to call his talent a "blend of vision with reality." Now,
all that is left him is "vision"--vision of the spirit. But with help--I
used to think it would be _my_ help: now I realize it will be
Dierdre's--who knows what extraordinary things my blind Brian may
accomplish? His hope is so beautiful, and so strong, that it has lit an
answering flame of hope in me.

He and I were in Ypres for a few days, just about the time I was
wondering why "Jim Wyndham" didn't keep his promise to find me again.
It was in Ypres, I remember, that I came across the box of "_Coeurs
d'Arras_" I'd brought with me. Opening it, I recalled the legend about a
girl who has never loved, falling in love within a month after first
eating an Arras Heart. It was then I said to myself, "Why, it has _come
true_! I have fallen in love with Jim Wyndham--and _he has forgotten
me_!"

Oh, Padre, how that pain comes back to me now, in the midst of the new
pain, like the "core of the brilliance within the brilliance!" Which
hurt is worse, to love a man, and believe oneself forgotten, or to love
and know one has been loved, and then become unworthy? I can't be sure.
I can't even be sure that, if I could, I would go back to being the old
self before I committed the one big sin of my life, which gave me Jim's
father and mother, and the assurance that _he had cared_. For a while,
after Mother Beckett told me about Jim's love for "The Girl," in spite
of my wickedness I glowed with a kind of happiness. I felt that, through
all the years of my life--even when I grew old--Jim would be _mine_,
young, handsome, gay, just as I had seen him on the Wonderful Day: that
I could always run away from outside things and shut the gate of the
garden on myself and Jim--that rose-garden on the border of Belgium.
Now, when I know--or almost know--that he will come back in the flesh