Afterward he would pass to more direct and personal love-making, which she would evade if possible or accept shyly and reluctantly. She was wearing his ring, but he doubted whether he had really stormed the inner fortress of her heart. This uncertainty, and the assurance that went with it of a precious gift not for the first chance comer, appealed to his fastidious instinct, all the more that he was sure she would some day come to him with shining eyes and outstretched hands. To-night Merrick found Betty distrait and troubled. Her attention to the recital of his problems was perfunctory. He was conscious of a slight annoyance. In spite of his force, Justin was a vain man, always ready to talk of himself and his achievements in a modest way to an interested and interesting young woman. It appeared that her father had had a difficulty with some tramps, which had eventuated in insolence that had brought upon the vagrants summary physical punishment. From her account of it, Justin judged that Reed had not handled the matter very wisely. There was a way to do such things with a minimum of friction. But he saw no need of worrying about it. The tramps had been given what they deserved and the affair was closed. It was like a woman to hold it heavily on her conscience because one of the ne’er-do-wells chanced to be young and good-looking. “If you’d seen him,” Betty protested. “A gentleman by the look of him, or had been once, fine-grained, high-spirited, and yet so down-and-out.” “If he’s down-and-out, it’s his own fault. A man’s never that so long as he holds to self-respect.” This was incontrovertibly true, but Betty chose to be irritated. Justin was so obviously successful. He might have had a little sympathy for the underdog, she thought. Everybody did not have a square, salient jaw like his. Weakness was not necessarily a crime. “He looks as though life had mauled him,” she said. “It’s taken something vital out of him. He doesn’t care what happens any more.” “If he can only mooch his three meals a day and enough cash to keep him supplied with bootleg poison,” the engineer added. They were walking up to the Three Pines, a rocky bluff from which they could in the daytime see far down the valley. She stopped abruptly. If she did not stamp her foot, at least the girl’s manner gave eloquently the effect of this indulgence. “He’s not like that at all--not at all. Don’t you ever sympathize with any one that’s in hard luck?” she cried out, her cheeks glowing with a suffusion of underlying crimson. “Not when he lies down under it.”