He ran towards her.
"I'm sorry I frighted ye, ma'am, but I was afraid I might skeer ye more if I lay low, and said nothin'." Even then, if she had been some fair young country girl, he would have relapsed after this speech into his former bashfulness.

But the face and figure she turned towards him were neither young nor fair: a woman past forty, with gray threads and splashes in her brushed-back hair, which was turned over her ears in two curls like frayed strands of rope.

Her forehead was rather high than broad, her nose large but well-shaped, and her eyes full but so singularly light in color as to seem almost sightless.

The short upper lip of her large mouth displayed her teeth in an habitual smile, which was in turn so flatly contradicted by every other line of her careworn face that it seemed gratuitously artificial.
Her figure was hidden by a shapeless garment that partook equally of the shawl, cloak, and wrapper.
"I am very foolish," she began, in a voice and accent that at once asserted a cultivated woman, "but I so seldom meet anybody here that a voice quite startled me.

That, and the heat," she went on, wiping her face, into which the color was returning violently--"for I seldom go out as early as this--I suppose affected me." Mr.Bowers had that innate Far-Western reverence for womanhood which I fancy challenges the most polished politeness.