My acquaintance introduced us to each other. I walked home with them to the house of Miss D(so was the strange, who was also the younger lady named.) The next day I called upon her; the acquaintance thus commenced did not droop; and, notwithstanding our youthfor Lucy D was only seventeen, and I nearly a year youngerwe soon loved, and with a love, which, full of poesy and dreaming, as from our age it necessarily must have been, was not less durable, nor less heart-felt, than if it had arisen from the deeper and more earthly sources in which later life only hoards its affections.
Oh, God! how little did I think of what our young folly entailed upon us! We delivered ourselves up to the dictates of our hearts, and forgot that there was a future. Neither of us had any ulterior design; we did not thinkpoor children that we wereof marriage, and settlements, and consent of relations. We touched each others hands, and were happy; we read poetry togetherand when we lifted up our eyes from the page, those eyes met, and we did not know why our hearts beat so violently; and at length, when we spake of love, and when we called each other Lucy and ; when we described all that we had thought in absenceand all we had felt when presentwhen we sat with our hands locked each in eachand at last, growing bolder, when in the still and quiet loneliness of a summer twilight we exchanged our first kiss, we did not dream that the world forbade what seemed to us so natural; norfeeling in our own hearts the impossibility of changedid we ever ask whether this sweet and mystic state of existence was to last for ever!
Lucy was an only child; her father was a man of wretched character. A profligate, a gamblerruined alike in fortune, hope, and reputation, he was yet her only guardian and protector. The village in which we both resided was near London; there Mr. D had a small cottage, where he left his daughter and his slender establishment for days, and sometimes for weeks together, while he was engaged in equivocal speculationsgiving no address, and engaged in no professional mode of life. Lucys mother had died long since, of a broken heart(that fate, too, was afterwards her daughters)so that this poor girl was literally without a monitor or a friend, save her own innocenceand, alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience. The lady with whom I had met her had known her mother, and she felt compassion for the child. She saw her constantly, and sometimes took her to her own house, whenever she was in the neighbourhood; but that was not often, and only for a few days at a time. Her excepted, Lucy had no female friend.
One evening we were to meet at a sequestered and lonely part of the brooks course, a spot which was our usual rendezvous. I waited considerably beyond the time appointed, and was just going sorrowfully away when she appeared. As she approached, I saw that she was in tearsand she could not for several moments speak for weeping. At length I learned that her father had just returned home, after a long absencethat he had announced his intention of immediately quitting their present home and going to a distant part of the country, orperhaps even abroad.