re being punished for these two childish things I did, I should
see a side of justice in it all. But it is for loving you I am being
punished: and not God himself shall make me let you go! Beloved,
Beloved, all my days are at your feet, and among them days when you held
me to your heart. Good-night; good-night always now!

LETTER LXXIII.

Dearest: I could never have made any appeal _from_ you to anybody: all my
appeal has been _to_ you alone. I have wished to hear reason from no other
lips but yours; and had you but really and deeply confided in me, I
believe I could have submitted almost with a light heart to what you
thought best:--though in no way and by no stretch of the imagination can I
see you coming to me for the last time and _saying_, as you only wrote,
that it was best we should never see each other again.

You could not have said that with any sound of truth; and how can it
look truer frozen into writing? I have kissed the words, because you
wrote them; not believing them. It is a suspense of unbelief that you
have left me in, oh, still dearest! Yet never was sad heart truer to the
fountain of all its joy than mine to yours. You had only to see me to
know that.

Some day, I dream, we shall come suddenly together, and you will see,
before a word, before I have time to gather my mind back to the bodily
comfort of your presence, a face filled with thoughts of you that have
never left it, and never been bitter:--I believe never once bitter. For
even when I think, and convince myself that you have wronged yourself--and
so, me also,--even then: oh, then most of all, my heart seems to break
with tenderness, and my spirit grow more famished than ever for the want
of you! For if you have done right, wisely, then you have no longer any
need of me: but if you have done wrong, then you must need me. Oh, dear
heart, let that need overwhelm you like a sea, and bring you toward me on
its strong tide! And come when you will I shall be waiting.

LETTER LXXIV.

Dearest and Dearest: So long as you are still this to my heart I trust to
have strength to write it; though it is but a ghost of old happiness that
comes to me in the act. I have no hope now left in me: but I love you not
less, only more, if that be possible: or is it the same love with just a
weaker body to contain it all? I find that to have definitely laid off all
hope gives me a certain relief: for now that I am so hopeless it becomes
less har