When she turned to a quiet corner and asked an elderly man for Mrs.Rigdon's house, he stared at her as if at an apparition.
"Is it Sydney Rigdon's wife that you're wanting ?" Susannah had raised her veil, and he looked at her face with the greatest curiosity.

Flushed with exercise, braced by the sharp air, her colour was brilliant and her eyes sparkling.

Her plain dress and heavy veil appeared to the man to be a disguise, so surprising to him was the brilliancy of her face and the modulation of her voice.
"Do you not know where the Rigdons live ?" she asked.
He was chewing tobacco, and now he spat upon the ground, not rudely, but as performing an habitual action in a moment of abstracted thought.

"Oh, I know well enough, but if ye won't mind my saying a word to ye, young lady, I'd advise ye to put up somewhere else.

I've got darters of my own--in course I don't know who ye may be or what ye may be doing here." This last was added in an apparent attempt to attain to some suspicion that he felt to be reasonable.
"You think ill of them because you despise their sect," she said gently, "but I am the wife of one of the elders." "Have ye got hold of some news that ye're carrying to them ?" He evinced a sudden interest that appeared to her extraordinary.
"What news ?" "Oh, _I_ don't know.