She gave him the very slightest of bows.

It was the faintest indication only of response to his salute; her eyes rested on his face with a strange, ungirlish calm, then wandered to the last trout which lay on the bank.
Stafford felt that something had to be said, but for the life of him, for the first time in his experience, he couldn't hit upon the thing to say.

"Good-afternoon" seemed to him too banal, commonplace; and he could think of nothing else for a moment.

However, it came at last.
"Will you be so good as to tell me if I am far from Carysford ?" he asked.
"Four miles and three-quarters by the road, three miles over the hill," she replied, slowly, as calmly as she had looked at him, and in a voice low and sweet, and with a ring, a tone, in it which in some indefinable way harmonised with her appearance.

It was quite unlike the conventional girl's voice; there rang in it the freedom of the lonely valley, the towering hills, the freedom and unconventionality of the girl's own figure and face and wind-tossed hair; and in it was a note of dignity, of independence, and of a pride which was too proud for defiance.