and makes no claim is
beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than
living because in dying I can give you the gift.

All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost
a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have
felt. Don't let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you;
the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you
ever said or did.

How I remember that first day, in the country, at the
Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were
all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a
chair--and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I
loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew
what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with
you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell
you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things
that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing--the late white
roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall
(we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I
wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some
labourers were singing in the fields far away.

And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came
to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote
about--what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray
life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could
never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could
you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.

And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see,
too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last
months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I
had always the little hope that some day I might give you these
myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling
over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved
me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to
give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and
that you should never know.

I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself;
I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not
to, if you think justly of it all.

Of course you will be sorr