May 30. May, with its young leaves, its radiance of blossoming fruit trees, its spring greenness,--never have I known such green,--lingers yet, with its sweet spring chill and its ripple of slow English streams among the grasses. Such a world of beauty, and a world of sorrow! Petals of apple blossom drift even through the open doorway, and everywhere is the murmur of the little wind among the leaves. I sit in my garden, under my apple trees, or walk where the sunshine filters down, clear and still, through the lime trees in the lane, thinking of many things. Close by the stream, at my garden's edge, grow palest purple irises, and at times they seem spirit lilies, delicate as light, growing beside you in your far place. A few days ago Don dug one of your books out of the case,--he loves to touch them with his faithful paw. It was Dante's _Paradiso_ and as it fell open I saw that you had marked certain words with my name: "dolce guida e cara," "sweet guide and dear." That was too beautiful a thing to say of a mere mortal woman. I find myself thinking consciously less about you as the days go on; a touch in the darkness, a gleam across the stars, a whisper by the river,--so you come back to me; but the different things we said and did do not return with quite such sharp distinctness and sharp pain. Yet I exist more and more in you, living your life and mine too, spirit to spirit. Loneliness seems forever impossible since you went out and left the gate ajar, and all the world came in, and all its sorrows. The griefs that enter, in some strange way solace my own, and this increasing sense of the anguish of the world is lightened and lifted by sharing it with other folk. It is good to feel so passionately and so utterly a part of all that lives and throbs and suffers. Though the life that goes on in the little red house must inevitably lack something of the human warmth and joy that we should have known together, more life and greater enters, I think, than would have been ours if our old dream of happiness had come true. One can bear whatever happens, so long as it makes one understand. I started out in loneliness to tell my story, to you and to myself, for comfort in the long silences, and lo! I have no story; I do not seem to be merely I; I have gone out of myself and cannot find my way back. In this relieving greatness is, perhaps, dim foreknowledge of what is to come. I have nothing left to ask of life, no demands to make: a little service, work, and sleep,--and then?