But
it is this knowing nothing that overwhelms me:--I strain my eyes for
sight and can't see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight and am given
great handfuls of darkness. I said to you the sun had dropped out of my
heaven.--My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you? Am I in the mold
with my face to yours, receiving the close impression of a misery in
which we are at one? Are you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for me,
as I now for you?
I wonder what, to the starving and drought-stricken, the taste of death
can be like! Do all the rivers of the world run together to the lips
then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long
deprivation ceases to be a want? Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and
thirst--an antidote to it all?
I may know soon. How very strange if at the last I forget to think of
you!
LETTER LXVI.
Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need--for
the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day
as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to
look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what _unanswerable_ things
they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!
There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a
drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it
now feels and waits.
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