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 commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray:  “There is no fault in you:  the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did.  All that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only right thing is to say good-by without meeting.  I know you will not forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I cause you.  You are the most generous woman I have known.  If it would comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it:  but I know you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was once, I dare not say how short a time ago.  To me you remain, what I always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet.”

This, dearest, I say and say:  and write down now lest you have forgotten it.  For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes with me to my grave.  How superstitious we are of our own bodies after death!—­I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to any sound again!  I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain things shall go with me to dissolution.

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one quite quite wishes not to exist.  I have no belief in future existence; yet I wish it so much—­to exist again outside all this failure of my life.  For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.

And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing altogether in vain.  If I can see sufficiently at the last to say—­Send him these, it will be almost like living again:  for surely you will love me again when you see how much I have suffered,—­and suffered because I would not let thought of you go.

Could you dream, Beloved, reading this that there is bright sunlight streaming over my paper as I write?

LETTER LXVII.

Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved?  I do not know in what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have.  Perhaps without knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received?  Dearest, I trust those I send reach you:  I send them, wishing till I grow weak.  My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to you:  and I am glad of that weariness—­it seems to be some virtue that has gone out of me.  If all my body could go out in the effort, I think I should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at last.

I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love’s cenotaph, among all my thoughts of you.  It comes from a graveyard full of “little deaths.”  I remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was still fortunate with us.  I must have been reckless in my happiness to do that!