could turn over every page of my heart like the pages of a book, you would see nothing there offensive to the least of your feelings ... not even to the outside fringes of your man’s vanity ... should you have any vanity like a man; which I do doubt.  I never wronged you in the least of things—­never ...  I thank God for it.  But ‘self-deceived,’ it was so easy for you to be:  see how on every side and day by day, men are—­and women too—­in this sort of feelings.  ‘Self-deceived,’ it was so possible for you to be, and while I thought it possible, could I help thinking it best for you that it should be so—­and was it not right in me to persist in thinking it possible?  It was my reverence for you that made me persist!  What was I that I should think otherwise?  I had been shut up here too long face to face with my own spirit, not to know myself, and, so, to have lost the common illusions of vanity.  All the men I had ever known could not make your stature among them.  So it was not distrust, but reverence rather.  I sate by while the angel stirred the water, and I called it Miracle.  Do not blame me now, ... my angel!

Nor say, that I ‘do not lean’ on you with all the weight of my ‘past’ ... because I do!  You cannot guess what you are to me—­you cannot—­it is not possible:—­and though I have said that before, I must say it again ... for it comes again to be said.  It is something to me between dream and miracle, all of it—­as if some dream of my earliest brightest dreaming-time had been lying through these dark years to steep in the sunshine, returning to me in a double light. Can it be, I say to myself, that you feel for me so? can it be meant for me? this from you?

If it is your ‘right’ that I should be gloomy at will with you, you exercise it, I do think—­for although I cannot promise to be very sorrowful when you come, (how could that be?) yet from different motives it seems to me that I have written to you quite superfluities about my ’abomination of desolation,’—­yes indeed, and blamed myself afterwards.  And now I must say this besides.  When grief came upon grief, I never was tempted to ask ‘How have I deserved this of God,’ as sufferers sometimes do:  I always felt that there must be cause enough ... corruption enough, needing purification ... weakness enough, needing strengthening ... nothing of the chastisement could come to me without cause and need.  But in this different hour, when joy follows joy, and God makes me happy, as you say, through you ...  I cannot repress the ...  ’How have I deserved this of Him?’—­I know I have not—­I know I do not.

Could it be that heart and life were devastated to make room for you?—­If so, it was well done,—­dearest!  They leave the ground fallow before the wheat.