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."
When the butcher rattled by in company with a staring calf's head and quivering pig's liver, nobody hailed him from the Tudor mansion. Roberta Editha was kneading bread on top of a flour-barrel in the buttery; Ethelberta was picking over currants on the back doorstep; and Miss Bray stood a little way off toward the lichen-grown stone wall blocking in her Antignone wailing over Polynices. Miss Bray had chosen the elder and more commonplace Ethelberta for her suggestion of a position, rather than the younger and more poetic Roberta Editha, for the simple reason that the former's attitude over her currants was more suggestive of an heroic corpse on her knees and less of a chastised infant than Roberta's would be under any circumstances.
Rowena, the eldest of the "girls," was busy at that moment, if the truth must be told, in looking to see if any of the boarders had carelessly left bureau-drawers or writing-desks unlocked. The boarders were all absent upon hill or shore, the invalid father slept in his chair, the mother in Baysville cemetery, and the Tudor mansion was still.
On a monster rock a mile or more away two figures made silhouettes against the jewelled sunset.
"Annie," said one of the figures, "I did not wish to make a sensation by telling it first at the supper-table, and I want your congratulations before any others. I have sold my Esmeralda. I go to Boston to-morrow, and shall sail for Europe next week."
Her sight was darkened, her heart stood still. Life seemed to die out of her with one horrible pang. Nevertheless, in an instant her head tiptilted, and she twittered her congratulations as airily as if the whole universe had burst into a sudden marvel of bloom and beauty and she were the first humming-bird born into it.
"Always keep your young nature and preserve your young ways, Annie," he said admiringly: "they are your greatest charm."
Then they turned and walked supperward together.