The young woman’s smile was a mocking little grimace. “It wasn’t at all that kind of ‘afraid’; it seemed to me more like just plain scare. While we were watching the drills, Mr. Regnier pulled him aside and spoke to him. They probably thought the drills were making such a clatter that I couldn’t hear what they said; but I _did_ hear.” “Cuss-words?” David suggested. He was still trying to maintain the good-naturedly playful attitude. She nodded vigorously. “Perfectly hair-raising!” she assured him. “Mr. Regnier said, ‘Why in the’--a long string of sizzling things--‘do you bring her here? Have you not of the senses the--blinkety-blank-blank--smallest portion?’ “I couldn’t hear what excuse Mr. Plegg made, but it was evidently not a very good one, for Mr. Regnier broke loose again: ‘_Sacre bleu!_ you are prip-pare to get yourself deeslike. _Hein!_ you shall chase her out of here so queek as _le bon Dieu_ will let you!’ You spoke of discipline a minute ago. I shouldn’t think you’d allow one of the under-assistants to talk that way to your second in command. It’s disgraceful.” Answering the disciplinary gibe, David sought once more to stave off the tunnel climax--if so be the breaker of discipline were working toward a climax. But again Miss Virginia proved herself a true inheritor of the Grillage obstinacies and persistences. “There is something the matter with that tunnel, David, and I want to know what it is,” she urged gravely. He told a half-truth merely because no plausible or practicable falsehood suggested itself at the moment. “It is a bit dangerous--in one place.” “But if it is dangerous for me it is dangerous for the workmen. Why don’t you timber the bad place?” He laughed. “What do you know about timbering tunnels?” “You forget that I’ve been eating the bread of the construction camps all my life.” “That’s so; I had forgotten.” In their excursions together over the job it had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she was familiar with many of the details of her father’s trade--and his own; details which would have been purest Greek to most women. Silas Plegg’s commendation was amply borne out by the fact; she was, indeed, “a pretty good little engineer, herself.” None the less his lips were sealed in the matter of tunnel-timbering--or the lack of it. He could not tell her that, for the sake of her father’s profit account, the weak roof must not be timbered. Hence, he temporized. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it dangerous; it isn’t so bad as you may be imagining. Timbering is an obstruction to the work, and we always get along without it if we can.” Then, resolute to shelve the subject so high that it couldn’t be reached again: “What has become of your father? I haven’t seen him for two or three days.” “He is down at the car to-night. But he hasn’t been well.” “Not well? I can’t think of him as not being well. He always looks to me as if he’d never known what it was to be sick.”