We neither knew nor sought to know. We obeyed the impulse to love
one another, as a bird obeys the impulse to fly.

Let it not be supposed that we possessed any natural gifts, or
advantages which singled us out as differing in a marked way from
other children at our time of life. We possessed nothing of the
sort. I had been called a clever boy at school; but there were
thousands of other boys, at thousands of other schools, who
headed their classes and won their prizes, like me. Personally
speaking, I was in no way remarkable--except for being, in the
ordinary phrase, "tall for my age." On her side, Mary displayed
no striking attractions. She was a fragile child, with mild gray
eyes and a pale complexion; singularly undemonstrative,
singularly shy and silent, except when she was alone with me.
Such beauty as she had, in those early days, lay in a certain
artless purity and tenderness of expression, and in the charming
reddish-brown color of her hair, varying quaintly and prettily in
different lights. To all outward appearance two perfectly
commonplace children, we were mysteriously united by some kindred
association of the spirit in her and the spirit in me, which not
only defied discovery by our young selves, but which lay too deep
for investigation by far older and far wiser heads than ours.

You will naturally wonder whether anything was done by our elders
to check our precocious attachment, while it was still an
innocent love union between a boy and a girl.

Nothing was done by my father, for the simple reason that he was
away from home.