It was the Ideal of her Yearning Soul. "Never till I meet a Being like this will I give my heart," she had said, now these many years. Once she thought she had met that Being: it was the natty clerk who sold her calico and clothes-pins at Mansfield. But when that mercenary Hylas married a Baysville widow with money she wept a while, and then saw clearly through her tears that the deceiver looked not in the least like a Being, but only like a very commonplace man. Once again it was an artist who had boarded with them a summer, and whose red hair fell over his rosy brow in a manner that indicated a possible Being. But it turned out that this artist was married and the father of a thriving family; whereupon he too faded out of Roberta Editha's ideal world into the prosaic region where are not Beings, but only men and women. After that it was several artists, all of whom in turn had died, under some blight, out from the thoughts of the burnt-umber maiden. Latterly she had been bending soulful eyes upon Ben Shaw, sure that at last in his lineaments she could trace the adored image. Ben's eyes were neither miraculously large nor superlatively dark: neither had he a small mouth with downward curves. He was blond and robust, inclined to be rather high-colored, especially after dinner, which proved his digestion defective or that appetite outran it; but, setting such little discrepancies aside, she was sure her Ideal was there. But while Roberta Editha described Annie Deane's airy manners in such unflattering terms, it is more than probable that Ben Shaw would be saying to the latter at that very moment, "Never lose your youthful nature, and always preserve your young ways, Annie: they are your greatest charm." For this was a habit with Ben Shaw. She was smiling and bridling now as she wrote by the seaward window, although she must have known that nothing could see her save that turquoise crescent of sea, the blue arch of the sky and the swaying rose-globes and leaves that shadowed her paper. She could not even dip her pen into the ink like anybody else, but must needs poise over it for a breezy instant, just as a humming-bird flutters over honeyed flowers. She had just written these words: "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as--" A voice called up from the southern-wood thicket under her window, where somebody, rubicund with stooping, was picking burdock-burrs from off his trousers' legs, "Miss Deane, will you go with me to see the sunset from Castle Rock? We can be home in time for supper."