Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake happy, either with or without thoughts
of me? I cannot understand, but I trust that it may be so. If I could
have a reason why I have so passed out of your life, I could endure it
better. What was in me that you did not wish? What was in you that I
must not wish for evermore? If the root of this separation was in you,
if in God's will it was ordered that we were to love, and, without
loving less, afterwards be parted, I could acquiesce so willingly. But
it is this knowing nothing that overwhelms me:--I strain my eyes for
sight and can't see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight and am given
great handfuls of darkness. I said to you the sun had dropped out of my
heaven.--My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you? Am I in the mold
with my face to yours, receiving the close impression of a misery in
which we are at one? Are you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for me,
as I now for you?

I wonder what, to the starving and drought-stricken, the taste of death
can be like! Do all the rivers of the world run together to the lips
then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long
deprivation ceases to be a want? Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and
thirst--an antidote to it all?

I may know soon. How very strange if at the last I forget to think of
you!

LETTER LXVI.

Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need--for
the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day
as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to
look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what _unanswerable_ things
they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!
There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a
drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it
now feels and waits.

All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only _seems_, dearest,
for I still say, I _do_ say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I,
who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these
monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes
reconciled with the pain that is there always.

Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for
granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did
love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you
no longer do.

And the commen