Our acquaintance consisted of playing touch, not even alone
together, but with other children; I can see her now rushing away from
me, her long plaits striking against her waist. But although this was
all that passed between us, we both had a feeling as of a mysterious
link connecting us. It was delightful to meet. She gave me a pink. She
cut a Queen of Hearts out of a pack of cards, and gave it to me; I
treasured it for the next five years like a sacred thing.
That was all that passed between us and more there never was, even when
at twelve years of age, at a children's ball, she confessed to me that
she had kept everything I had given her--gifts of the same order as her
own. But the impression of her beauty filled my being.
Some one had made me a present of some stuffed humming-birds, perched on
varnished twigs under a glass case. I always looked at them while I was
reading in the nursery; they stood on the bookshelves which were my
special property. These birds with their lovely, shining, gay-coloured
plumage, conveyed to me my first impression of foreign or tropical
vividness of colouring. All that I was destined to love for a long time
had something of that about it, something foreign and afar off.
The girl was Danish as far as her speech was concerned, but not really
Danish by descent, either on her father or her mother's side; her name,
too, was un-Danish.
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