makes me so happy is that the one
which has been rubbing its ribs against you for so long seems to have
given itself a day off, or crumbled to dissolution. And you are yourself
again, as you have not been for many a long day. I suppose there has
been thunder, and the air is cleared: and I am not to know any of that
side of your discomforts?

Still I _do_ know. You have been writing your letters with pressed lips
for a month past: and I have been a mere toy-thing, and no helpmate to
you at all at all. Oh, why will she not love me? I know I am lovable
except to a very hard heart, and hers is not: it is only like yours,
reserved in its expression. It is strange what pain her prejudice has
been able to drop into my cup of happiness; and into yours, dearest, I
fear, even more.

Oh, I love you, I love you! I am crying with it, having no words to
declare to you what I feel. My tears have wings in them: first
semi-detached, then detached. See, dearest, there is a rain-stain to
make this letter fruitful of meaning!

It is sheer convention--and we, creatures of habit--that tears don't
come kindly and easily to express where laughter leaves off and a
something better begins. Which is all very ungrammatical and entirely
me, as I am when I get off my hinges too suddenly.

Amen, amen! When we are both a hundred we shall remember all this very
peaceably; and the "sanguine flower" will not look back at us less
beautifully because in just one spot it was inscribed with woe. And if
we with all our aids cannot have patience, where in this midge-bitten
world is that virtue to find a standing?

I kiss you--how? as if it were for the first or the last time? No, but
for all time, Beloved! every time I see you or think of you sums up my
world. Love me a little, too, and I will be as contented as I am your
loving.

LETTER LVII.

Come to me! I will not understand a word you have written till you come.
Who has been using your hand to strike me like this, and why do you lend
it? Oh, if it is she, you do not owe her _that_ duty! Never write such
things:--speak! have you ever found me not listen to you, or hard to
convince? Dearest, dearest!--take what I mean: I cannot write over this
gulf. Come to me,--I will believe anything you can _say_, but I can
believe nothing of this written. I must see you and hear what it is you
mean. Dear heart, I am blind till I set eyes on you again! Beloved, I have
nothing, nothing in me but love for