All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this year with you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my life before. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown, a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, and with an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart's heavens. I did not know for what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life's dearest fulfilment was before me. After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart, only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. And I had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happier destiny. I lost father's boundary lines of prayer and creed. Some limitation of my own mind passed away and I entered into a sort of heathen fellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only of you. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters, foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by some miracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of your window sill. This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you. Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian attitude which you assumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpass in philosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention, compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe of your "upper chamber." I resented that cold expression of your spirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wings against your high windows. In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I _knew_ that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strange altitudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in the first assurances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set me free. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every bird with a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfect peace,--the same I have heard father's repentant sinners profess. And I was resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice of romance to reality. But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only the beginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and that his love is a sort of _fi. fa._, which he will some day serve upon her heart.