In the example sentence the order of action (in the order of the actions) is the same as the sequence of pictures in the form of numbers.
- I talked to her for a few days before she arrived. She stayed with me.
What was the order of actions in this sentence?
What are people who is not used to reading blogs?
Why did speaking happen before dawn?
What might be confusing to you is the fact that the arrived is in past perfect while the talked is in the simple past. The fact there’s a past perfect in the sentence means that the sentence is somehow based in the past. The events presented are different than your narration. Definitely. I don’t know if it’s a technical term, but I try to think of time as the base time or reference time for a sentence.
Since the talked is simple past, you would normally expect that it happened at the reference time of the sentence, and the past perfect had arrived happened before it. Besides grammatical cues, before takes precedence over such grammatical cues because it is more explicit.
However, before has special meaning.
