Now that I feel so much better, I know that I was ill. Before dinner, I lay down on my bed and slept two unrestful hours. I dreamed that I was climbing toilfully up a stony path between ruinous walls and close-grown ancient thorns. I climbed in a light that was neither of the night nor of the day: in the wan and chilly light of a moon-like sun such as I had seen through the water. And, all the time I climbed, I knew that he was near. Thrice I saw him through the briers, and once he called my name: but he was always at the other side of the wall. I dreamed much more. But though I couldn’t help dreaming, I can help recalling it all, I can keep writing it. Yet what can I do if I don’t write? I can’t get to close grips with a book. The end of _Les Chouans_ is too beautiful, too sorrowful, and I’ve no one to talk to, save Susan. Susan has been an angel all day: but I couldn’t talk to her just now. I will go to bed. _Midnight_. The house is quiet as the grave. I cannot sleep. Perhaps the fire was too restless and bright. The room is so warm that I am sitting without even a dressing-gown, just as I slipped out of bed. I have a plan of wooing sleep. I am going to write to Ruddington. Not a reply on behalf of Susan. Not a letter that will ever be posted. Not a letter that any eye save mine shall ever see. Once, just this once, because I am sleepless, and shaken, and worn, and unhappy, I will let myself go. For half an hour, he shall be mine. His rose-leaf, my stolen rose-leaf, shall lie by my hand. To-morrow ... the fire for what I write to-night. And for me--to-morrow and all the morrows after it--no looking back to this hour, no brooding, no idle regret, nothing save the quest of forgetfulness. This is what I write--the first and last love-letter of my life: SAINT VERONICA’S, _at dead of night_. BELOVED,--You bid me write to you just once without distrust either of myself or of you. You bid me pour out all my heart. I obey. Once--this once--I will speak to you as I have never spoken before, as I can never speak again. You have seen me, in the flesh, three times, treading the solid ground, breathing the summer air. Yet you do not love me. I have seen you only in a portrait: and I love you as wildly, as eternally, as immeasurably as you believe you love poor Susan. I know it all through my soul: and, as you wrote in your first letter, there can never be any one in the world for me save you. Your portrait was the beginning. How I can have been near your own very self those three times in England without turning to you as a flower turns to the sun, without answering you as deep answers deep, I do not know. Perhaps my heart did turn, my soul did answer. But, for my consciousness, the portrait was the beginning. And what your portrait began your letters have carried on.