Oh, dear face, dear unforgettable lost face, my soul strains up to look for you through the blind eyes that have been left to torment me because they can never behold you.  Very often I have seen you looking grieved, shutting away some sorrow in yourself quietly:  but never once angry or impatient at any of the small follies of men.  Come, then, and look at me patiently now!  I am your blind girl:  I must cry out because I cannot see you.  Only make me believe that you yet think of me as, when you so unbelievably separated us, you said you had always found me—­“the dearest and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet.”  Beloved, if in your heart I am still that, separation does not matter.  I can wait, I can wait.

I kiss your feet:  even to-morrow may bring the light.  God bless you!  I pray it more than ever; because to me to-night has been so very dark.

LETTER LXXIX.

Dearest:  I have not written to you for three weeks.  At last I am better again.  You seem to have been waiting for me here:  always wondering when I would come back.  I do come back, you see.

Dear heart, how are you?  I kiss your feet; you are my one only happiness, my great one.  Words are too cold and cruel to write anything for me.  Picture me:  I am too weak to write more, but I have written this, and am so much better for it.

Reward me some day by reading what is here.  I kiss, because of you, this paper which I am too tired to fill any more.

Love, nothing but love!  Into every one of these dead words my heart has been beating, trying to lay down its life and reach to you.

LETTER LXXX.

A secret, dearest, that will be no secret soon:  before I am done with twenty-three I shall have passed my age.  Beloved, it hurts me more than I can say that the news of it should come to you from anyone but me:  for this, though I write it, is already a dead letter, lost like a predestined soul even in the pains that gave it birth.  Yes, it does pain me, frightens me even, that I must die all by myself, and feeling still so young.  I thought I should look forward to it, but I do not; no, no, I would give much to put it off for a time, until I could know what it will mean for me as regards you.  Oh, if you only knew and cared, what wild comfort I might have in the knowledge!  It seems strange that if I were going away from the chance of a perfect life with you I should feel it with less pain than I feel this.  The dust and the ashes of life are all that I have to let fall:  and it is bitterness itself to part with them.

How we grow to love sorrow!  Joy is never so much a possession—­it goes over us, incloses us like air or sunlight; but sorrow goes into us and becomes part of our flesh and bone.  So that I, holding up my hand to the sunshine, see sorrow red and transparent like stained glass between me and the light of day, sorrow that has become inseparably mine, and is the very life I am wishing to keep!