MY DEAREST--MY BEST BELOVED: This is the last of the letters. I am going to send them all to you now, so that you may know all. I read this morning in the paper that you were to be married. And now there is nothing left for me but to die. When you read this I shall be dead.
You must not blame me, or think me too cowardly. I am a fragile person, I know, and my life hung on you. Without hope it can't go on; it's too feeble to find anything else to live for. And you could never, never blame yourself. How could you have helped it? How could you have dreamed that I loved you? If you had you could have done nothing but be sorry--and irked. But it comforts me in dying to let you know how I have loved you; it is like a dying gift I make you,--do you see?--all the love that I have hidden. If I had lived I could never have made the gift. Had you guessed, or had I told you, it would have been a burden, a ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing that I am dead, my love must come to you as a blessing; you must feel it as something, in its little way beautiful, and care for it; for any love that only gives and makes no claim is beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than living because in dying I can give you the gift.
All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have felt. Don't let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you; the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you ever said or did.
How I remember that first day, in the country, at the Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a chair--and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing--the late white roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall (we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some labourers were singing in the fields far away.