night; very soon it will have to be good-by.

LETTER LXXXI.

Beloved: I woke last night and believed I had your arms round me, and that
all storms had gone over me forever. The peace of your love had inclosed
me so tremendously that when I was fully awake I began to think that what
I held was you dead, and that our reconciliation had come at that great
cost.

Something remains real of it all, even now under the full light of day:
yet I know you are not dead. Only it leaves me with a hope that at the
lesser cost of my own death, when it comes, happiness may break in, and
that whichever of us has been the most in poor and needy ignorance will
know the truth at last--the truth which is an inseparable need for all
hearts that love rightly.

Even now to me the thought of you is a peace passing _all_ understanding.
Beloved, Beloved, Beloved, all the greetings I ever gave you gather here,
and are hungry to belong to you by a better way than I have ever dreamed.
I am yours, till something more than death swallows me up.

LETTER LXXXII.

Dearest: If you will believe any word of mine, you must not believe that I
have died of a broken heart should science and the doctors bring about a
fulfillment of their present prophesyings concerning me.

I think my heart has held me up for a long time, not letting me know
that I was ill: I did not notice. And now my body snaps on a stem that
has grown too thin to hold up its weight. I am at the end of twenty-two
years: they have been too many for me, and the last has seemed a useless
waste of time. It is difficult not to believe that great happiness might
have carried me over many more years and built up for me in the end a
renewed youth: I asked that quite frankly, wishing to know, and was told
not to think it.

So, dearest, whatever comes, whatever I may have written to fill up my
worst loneliness, be sure, if you care to be, that though my life was
wholly yours, my death was my own, and comes at its right natural time.
Pity me, but invent no blame to yourself. My heart has sung of you even
in the darkest days; in the face of everything, the blankness of
everything, I mean, it has clung to an unreasoning belief that in spite of
appearances all had some well in it, above all to a conviction that--
perhaps without knowing it--you still love me. Believing _that,_ it
could not break, could not, dearest. Any other part of me, but not that.

Beloved, I kiss your face, I k