It was about an hour before sundown when the eagle had risen and fled,
and the sunset light found the girl who had watched it still standing in
the same place. All that time a man had been talking to her; but she
herself had not been talking, she had given him little reply. The two
were not close to the house; large, square-built piles of logs, sawn
and split for winter fuel, separated them from it. The man leaned
against the wood now; the girl stood upright, leaning on nothing.

Her face, which was healthy, was at the same time pale. Her hair was
very red, and she had much of it. She was a large, strong young woman.
She looked larger and stronger than the man with whom she was
conversing. He was a thin, haggard fellow, not at first noticeable in
the landscape, for his clothes and beard were faded and worn into
colours of earth and wood, so that Nature seemed to have dealt with him
as she deals with her most defenceless creatures, causing them to grow
so like their surroundings that even their enemies do not easily observe
them. This man, however, was not lacking in a certain wiry physical
strength, nor in power of thought or of will. And these latter powers,
if the girl possessed them, were as yet only latent in her, for she had
the heavy and undeveloped appearance of backward youth.

The man was speaking earnestly. At last he said:--

"Come now, Sissy, be a good lassie and say that ye're content to stay.
Ye've always been a good lassie and done what I told ye before."

His accent was Scotch, but not the broad Scotch of an entirely
uneducated man. There was sobriety written in the traits of his face,
and more--a certain quality of intellectual virtue of the higher stamp.