There was an unusual grace about her, in
spite of her masculine air. Her features were regular, the nose
straight and delicate, the mouth resolute, the brow broad, and the
eyes intensely blue, perhaps tender, when not flashing with anger,
and altogether without the listless expression he had marked in
other mountain women, and which, he had noticed, deadened into
pathetic hopelessness later in life. Her figure was erect, and her
manner, despite its roughness, savored of something high-born.
Where could she have got that bearing? She belonged to a race
whose descent, he had heard, was unmixed English; upon whose
lips lingered words and forms of speech that Shakespeare had
heard and used. Who could tell what blood ran in her veins?
Musing, he had come almost unconsciously to a spur of the
mountains under which lay the little mining-camp. It was six
o'clock, and the miners, grim and black, each with a pail in hand
and a little oil-lamp in his cap, were going down from work. A
shower had passed over the mountains above him, and the last
sunlight, coming through a gap in the west, struck the rising mist
and turned it to gold. On a rock which thrust from the mountain
its gray, sombre face, half embraced by a white arm of the mist,
Clayton saw the figure of a woman. He waved his hat, but the
figure stood motionless, and he turned into the woods toward the
camp.
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