My pride died when I saw love looking out of your eyes at me; and it has not come back to me now that I see you no more. I have no wish that it should. In all ways possible I would wish to be as I was when you loved me; and seek to change nothing except as you bid me. LETTER LXII. So I have seen you, Beloved, again, after fearing that I never should. A day's absence from home 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.