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 have not said—­I never could say it—­“Let the day perish wherein Love was born!” I forget nothing of you:  you are clear to me,—­all but one thing:  why we have become as we are now, one whole, parted and sent different ways.  And yet so near!  On my most sleepless nights my pillow is yours:  I wet your face with my tears and cry, “Sleep well.”

To-night also, Beloved, sleep well!  Night and morning I make you my prayer.

LETTER LXXVII.