"DEAR ONE:--Your last letter gave me great pain. It breaks my heart to see you looking so earnestly and expectantly into my future. Beloved, that I have grown and developed so much in the last seven years is no proof that I can still keep on growing. If you understood, darling, you would see that it is just the other way. I have grown year by year, hour by hour, because hour by hour I have loved you more. That is all! I have felt the growth. I know it, as clearly as you do. But I know the secret of it as you do not; and I know the limit of it, as you cannot. I cannot love you more, precious one! Neither would I if I could! One heart-beat more in a minute, and I should die! But all that you have so much loved and cared for, dear, calling it intellectual growth and expansion in me, has been only the clearing, refining, and stimulating of every faculty, every sense, by my love for you. When I have said or written a word which has pleased you thus, if there were any special fitness or eloquence in the word, it was only because I sought after what would best carry my thought to you, darling; what would be best frame, best setting, to keep the flowers or the sky which I had to see alone,--to keep them till you could see them too! Oh, dear one, do understand that there is nothing of me except my heart and my love! While they were wonderingly, tremblingly, rapturously growing within me, under the sweet warmth of your love, no wonder I changed day by day. But, precious one, it is ended. The whole solemn, steadfast womanhood within me recognizes it. Beloved master, in one sense you can teach me no more! I am content. I desire nothing. One moment of full consciousness of you, of life, of your love, is more than all centuries of learning, all eternities of inspiration. I would rather at this moment, dear, lay my cheek on your hand, and sit in my old place by your knee, and feel myself the woman you have made me, than know all that God knows, and make a universe!
"Beloved, do not say such things to me any more; and whenever you feel such ambition and hope stirring in your heart, read over this little verse, and be sure that your child knew what she said when she wrote it:--
"O Love, who walkest slow among my sheaves, Smiling at tint and shape, thy smile of peace, But whispering of the next sweet year's increase,-- O tender Love, thy loving hope but grieves My heart! I rue my harvest, if it leaves Thee vainly waiting after harvests cease, Like one who has been mocked by title lease To barren fields.