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 kiss your lips and eyes:  my mind melts into kisses when I think of you.  However weak the rest of me grows, my love shall remain strong and certain.  If I could look at you again, how in a moment you would fill up the past and the future and turn even my grief into gold!  Even my senses then would forget that they had ever been starved.  Dear “share of the world,” you have been out of sight, but I have never let you go!  Ah, if only the whole of me, the double doubting part of me as well, could only be so certain as to be able to give wings to this and let it fly to you!  Wish for it, and I think the knowledge will come to me!

Good-night!  God brings you to me in my first dream:  but the longing so keeps me awake that sometimes I am a whole night sleepless.

LETTER LXXXIII.

I am frightened, dearest, I am frightened at death.  Not only for fear it should take me altogether away from you instead of to you, but for other reasons besides,—­instincts which I thought gone but am not rid of even yet.  No healthy body, or body with power of enjoyment in it, wishes to die, I think:  and no heart with any desire still living out of the past.  We know nothing at all really:  we only think we believe, and hope we know; and how thin that sort of conviction gets when in our extremity we come face to face with the one immovable fact of our own death waiting for us!  That is what I have to go through.  Yet even the fear is a relief:  I come upon something that I can meet at last; a challenge to my courage whether it is still to be found here in this body I have worn so weak with useless lamentations.  If I had your hand, or even a word from you, I think I should not be afraid:  but perhaps I should.  It is all one.  Good-by:  I am beginning at last to feel a meaning in that word which I wrote at your bidding so long-ago.  Oh, Beloved, from face to feet, good-by!  God be with you wherever you go and I do not!

LETTER LXXXIV.

Dearest:  I am to have news of you.  Arthur came to me last night, and told me that, if I wished, he would bring me word of you.  He goes to-morrow.  He put out the light that I might not see his face:  I felt what was there.