"No. I don't want to see any one but you. I guess we can talk here."
The baby sat up at the sound of the stranger's voice and stared at her with round, blinking eyes. She drew off her cotton gloves and whipped her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost to her eyes.
"Maybe you'll think it strange for me to come," she began, "but I didn't know what else to do. I'm Ruby Adair."
She waited a little, but her statement awoke no response in Lib's noncommittal face.
"I don't know whether you know what they're saying over at the store or not," the visitor went on haltingly.
"No," said Lib, with dry indifference; "there ain't any men in our family to do the loafin' and gossipin' for us."
"Since you moved over here from Bunch Grass Valley, they're saying that Thad Farnham is the—is—you know he was in the tile works over there a year or more ago."
"Yes, I know." Lib's voice was like the crackling of dead leaves under foot.
"I think it's pretty hard," continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener's impassive face; "him and me's engaged!"
Lib's eyes narrowed, and the velvety down on her lip showed black against the whiteness around her mouth.