much, than through loving too
little. It is a good fault as faults go. And it is _my_ fault, Beloved:
so some day you may have to be tender to it.

LETTER LXXVI.

Dearest: I feel constantly that we are together still: I cannot explain.
When I am most miserable, even so that I feel a longing to fly out of
reach of the dear household voices which say shy things to keep me
cheerful,--I feel that I have you in here waiting for me. Heart's heart,
in my darkest, it is you who speak to me!

As I write I have my cheek pressed against yours. None of it is true:
not a word, not a day that has separated us! I am yours: it is only the
poor five senses part of us that spells absence. Some day, some day you
will answer this letter which has to stay locked in my desk. Some day,
I mean, an answer will reach me:--without your reading this, your answer
will come. Is not your heart at this moment answering me?

Dearest, I trust you: I could not have dreamed you to myself, therefore
you must be true, quite independently of me. You as I saw you once with
open eyes remain so forever. You cannot make yourself, Beloved, not to be
what you are: you have called my soul to life if for no other reason than
to bear witness of you, come what may. No length of silence can make a
truth once sounded ever cease to be: borne away out of our hearing it
makes its way to the stars: dispersed or removed it cannot be lost. I too,
for truth's sake, may have to be dispersed out of my present self which
shuts me from you: but I shall find you some day,--you who made me, you
who every day make me! A part of you cut off, I suffer pain because I _am_
still part of you. If I had no part in you I should suffer nothing. But I
do, I do. One is told how, when a man has lost a limb, he still feels
it,--not the pleasure of it but the pain. Dearest, are you aware of me
now?

Because I am suffering, you shall not think I am entirely miserable. But
here and now I am all unfinished ends. Desperately I need faith at times
to tell me that each shoot of pain has a point at which it assuages
itself and becomes healing: that pain is not endurance wasted; but that
I and my weary body have a goal which will give a meaning to all this,
somehow, somewhere: never, I begin to fear, here, while this body has
charge of me.

Dearest, I lay my heart down on yours and cry: and having worn myself
out with it and ended, I kiss your lips and bless God that I have known
you.

I