has given me this great fortune.

The pain of it was less than it might have been, since our looks did not
meet. To have seen your eyes shut out their recognition of me would have
hurt me too much: I must have cried out against such a judgment. But you
passed by the window without knowing, your face not raised: so little
changed, yet you have been ill. Arthur tells me everything: he knows I
must have any word of you that goes begging.

Oh, I hope you are altogether better, happier! An illness helps some
people: the worst of their sorrow goes with the health that breaks down
under it; and they come out purged into a clearer air, and are made
whole for a fresh trial of life.

I hear that you are going quite away; and my eyes bless this chance to
have embraced you once again. Your face is the kindest I have ever
seen: even your silence, while I looked at you, seemed a grace instead
of a cruelty. What kindness, I say to myself, even if it be mistaken
kindness, must have sealed those dear lips not to tell me of my unworth!

Oh, if I could see once into the brain of it all! No one but myself knows
how good you are: how can I, then, be so unworthy of you? Did you think I
would not surrender to anything you fixed, that you severed us so
completely, not even allowing us to meet, and giving me no way to come
back to you though I might come to be all that you wished? Ah, dear face,
how hungry you have made me!--the more that I think you are not yet so
happy as I could wish,--as I could make you,--I say it foolishly:--yet if
you would trust me, I am sure.

Oh, how tired loving you now makes me! physically I grow weary with the
ache to have you in my arms. And I dream, I dream always, the shadows of
former kindness that never grow warm enough to clasp me before I
wake.--Yours, dearest, waking or sleeping.

LETTER LXIII.

Do you remember, Beloved, when you came on your birthday, you said I was
to give you another birthday present of your own choosing, and I promised?
And it was that we were to do for the whole day what _I_ wished: you were
not to be asked to choose.

You said then that it was the first time I had ever let you have your
way, which was to see me be myself independently of you:--as if such a
self existed.

You will never see what I write now; and I did not do then any of the
things I most wished: for first I wished to kneel down and kiss your
hands and feet; and you would not have liked that. Even now