ravine.
I cannot write--I cannot think and yet I must do both. What have I done
but love with all my womanhood and all my motherhood!

After all it was beautiful for him to die and go to heaven while flowers
filled his hands. A loud cry has gone up in my soul; an echo as it were
of the funereal _Consummatum est_, which is pronounced in church on Good
Friday at the hour when the _Saviour_ died. And all day I wring my hands
helplessly and can do nought but build dungeons and dungeons in the air.
I speak in an altered voice as though my instrument had lost several
strings and those that remained were loosened.

Dearest--can you tell me--am I responsible for his death? All during
last night I seemed to hear God's voice asking: "Cain, where is Abel?"
and I wail and beseech: "Am I my brother's keeper?" My soul is
guilty--guilty of loving him--guilty of his death, for had I not loved
him he would never have known the Black Hills. Oh! if I could but be
resigned--if I could but bind up my bleeding wounds and lose myself in
immeasurable lassitude!

I have pressed his lips for the last time, my precious son is at my
breast--his long lashes are pressed tightly against his cheeks as if to
secure his eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of his
young soul to recollect and hold fast a bliss that had been perfect but
fleeting. His tiny pink and white ear framed by a stray lock of his hair
and outlined by a wrapping of lace from you, would make an artist, a
painter, even an old man wildly in love with his perfect little being,
and will, please God, restore me, a mad woman to her senses!

Come to my Black Hills, I am crushed, desolate, heart-broken--come to

MARIANNE.

The Black Hills.
July 2.

One week has passed Dear, since you left us--a strange week of
readjustment and thought. All of those precious months that you have
given me are but another expression of your divine friendship. The
poignant grief is gone with you and my gratitude to you can but be shown
by the degree of bravery that I now manifest.

Every day this week, my son and I have sat in the sunshine near the two
mounds, which my remaining bronze boy has decorated with crocuses from
the neighboring ravine. He spends long hours after dark, gathering wild
flowers in the moonlight. His devotion to me and my dead love, is the
saddest, most boundless tr