The girl was sitting in a big chair before a desk in the farther corner of the room. She was dressed just as she had been on the drive; she had not removed cap, coat or gloves since arriving. Her hands lay palms up in her lap, her square little shoulders sagged, and her face was pale and troubled. A tiny crease of worry had come between her wonderful blue eyes, and her gaze wandered uncertainly, as if seeking help in the face of a problem that had proved too hard for her to handle alone. At the sight of Toppy, instead of giving way to a look of relief, her troubled expression deepened. She started. She seemed even to shrink from him. The words froze in Toppy’s mouth and he stood stock-still. “Don’t!” he groaned boyishly. “Please don’t look at me like that, Miss Pearson! I—I’m not that sort. I want to help you—if you need it. I heard what Reivers just said. I——What do you take me for, anyhow? A mucker who would force himself upon a lady?” The anguish in his tone and in his honest, good-natured countenance was too real to be mistaken. He had cried out from the depths of a clean heart which had been stirred strangely, and the woman in the girl responded with quick sympathy. She looked at him with a look that would have aroused the latent manhood in a cad—which Toppy was not—and Toppy, in his eagerness, found that he could look back. “Why did you come out here?” she asked plaintively. “Why did you decide to follow me, after you had heard that I was coming here? I know you did that; you hadn’t intended coming here until you heard. What made you do it?” “Because you came here,” said Toppy honestly. “But why—why——” Toppy had regained control of himself. “Why do you think I did it, Miss Pearson?” he asked quietly. “I—I don’t want to think—what I think,” she stammered. “And that is that I’m a cad, the sort of a mucker who forces his attentions upon women who are alone.” “Well—” she looked up with a challenge in her eyes—“you had been drinking, hadn’t you? Could you blame me if I did?” “Not a bit,” said Toppy. “I’m the one whose to blame. I’m the goat. I don’t suppose I had a right to butt in. Of course I didn’t. I’m a big fool; always have been. I—I just couldn’t stand for seeing you start out for this Hell Camp alone; that’s all. It’s no reason, I know, but—there you are. I’d heard something of the place in the morning and I had a notion it was a pretty tough place. You—you didn’t look as if you were used to anything of the sort——Well,” he wound up desperately, “it didn’t look right, your going off alone among all these roughnecks; and—and that’s why I butted in.” She made no reply, and Toppy continued: “I didn’t have any right to do it, I know. I deserve to be suspected——” “No!” she laughed. “Please, Mr. Treplin! That was horrid of me.”