love and longing crying out
to another love and longing, as great and hopeless. And here, in the
rose-radiance of the sunset, with the sea-music in the dim air, he
wrote his letter to her.

My Lady: How beautiful it is to think that there is nothing to
prevent my loving you! There is much--everything--to prevent
me from telling you that I love you. But nothing has any right
to come between my heart and its own; it is permitted to love
you forever and ever and serve and reverence you in secret and
silence. For so much, dear, I thank life, even though the
price of the permission must always be the secret and the
silence.

I have just come from you, my lady. Your voice is still in my
ears; your eyes are still looking into mine, gravely yet half
smilingly, sweetly yet half provokingly. Oh, how dear and
human and girlish and queenly you are--half saint and half
very womanly woman! And how I love you with all there is of me
to love--heart and soul and brain, every fibre of body and
spirit thrilling to the wonder and marvel and miracle of it!
You do not know it, my sweet, and you must never know it. You
would not even wish to know it, for I am nothing to you but
one of many friends, coming into your life briefly and passing
out of it, of no more account to you than a sunshiny hour, a
bird's song, a bursting bud in your garden. But the hour and
the bird and the flower gave you a little delight in their
turn, and when you remembered them once before forgetting,
that was their reward and blessing. That is all I ask, dear
lady, and I ask that only in my own heart. I am content to
love you and be forgotten. It is sweeter to love you and be
forgotten than it would be to love any other woman and live in
her lifelong remembrance: so humble has love made me, sweet,
so great is my sense of my own unworthiness.

Yet love must find expression in some fashion, dear, else it
is only pain, and hence these letters to you which you will
never read. I put all my heart into them; they are the best
and highest of me, the buds of a love that can never bloom
openly in the sunshine of your life. I weave a chaplet of
them, dear, and crown you with it. They will never fade, for
such love is eternal.

It is a whole summer since I first met you. I had been waiting
for you all my life before and did no