"I kem over hyar ter hev a word with ye," she said.
At the sound of a human voice Luke Todd's wife struggled to her feet. She held the piggin with one arm encircled about it, and with the other hand she clutched the plaid shawl around her throat. Her bright hair was tossed by the rising wind.
"I 'lowed I'd find ye hyar a-milkin' 'bout now."
The homely allusion reassured the younger woman.
"I hev ter begin toler'ble early," she said. "Spot gins 'bout a gallon a milkin' now."
Spot's calf, which subsisted on what was left over, seemed to find it cruel that delay should be added to his hardships, and he lifted up his voice in a plaintive remonstrance. This reminded Mrs. Todd of his existence; she turned and let down the bars that served to exclude him.
The stranger was staring at her very hard. Somehow she quailed under that look. Though it was fixed upon her in unvarying intensity, it had a strange impersonality. This woman was not seeing her, despite that wide, wistful, yearning gaze; she was thinking of something else, seeing some one else.
And suddenly Luke Todd's wife began to stare at the visitor very hard, and to think of something that was not before her.
"I be the ranger's wife," said Eugenia. "I kem over hyar ter tell ye he never tuk yer black mare nowise but honest, bein' the ranger."
She found it difficult to say more. Under that speculative, unseeing look she too faltered.