tary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say
over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault
in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All
that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only
right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not
forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I
cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would
comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know
you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather
than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was
once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I
always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray
to meet."

This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten
it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes
with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after
death!--I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to
any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain
things shall go with me to dissolution.

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one
quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence;
yet I wish it so much--to exist again outside all this failure of my
life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.

And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing
altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say--Send
him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love
me again when you see how much I have suffered,--and suffered because I
would not let thought of you go.

Could you dream, Beloved, reading _this_ that there is bright sunlight
streaming over my paper as I write?

LETTER LXVII.

Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in
what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without
knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received?
Dearest, I trust those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till I grow
weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to
you: and I am glad of that weariness--it seems to be some virtue that has
gone out of me. If all my body could go out in the effort, I