“I’m afraid I’m a very poor critic,” he said bluntly.  “I never conceived that this sort of thing was at all to your taste.”

“I came to see my father because I wanted to,” she said, with equal bluntness.

“And I came to see him though I didn’t want to,” he said, with a cynical laugh.

She turned, and fixed her brown eyes inquiringly upon him.

“Why did you come, then?”

“I was ordered by my directors.”

“Then you did not believe he was a thief?” she asked, her eyes softening.

“It would ill become me to accuse your father or my directors,” he answered diplomatically.

She was quick enough to detect the suggestion of moral superiority in his tone, but woman enough to forgive it.  “You’re no friend of Windibrook,” she said, “I know.”

“I am not,” he replied frankly.

“If you would like to see my popper, I can manage it,” she said hesitatingly.  “He’ll do anything for me,” she added, with a touch of her old pride.

“Who could blame him?” returned Masterton gravely.  “But if he is a free man now, and able to go where he likes, and to see whom he likes, he may not care to give an audience to a mere messenger.”

“You wait and let me see him first,” said the girl quickly.  Then, as the sound of sleigh-bells came from the road outside, she added, “Here he is.  I’ll get your clothes; they are out here drying by the fire in the shed.”  She disappeared through a back door, and returned presently bearing his dried garments.  “Dress yourself while I take popper into the shed,” she said quickly, and ran out into the road.

Masterton dressed himself with difficulty.  Although circulation was now restored, and he felt a glow through his warmed clothes, he had been sorely bruised and shaken by his fall.  He had scarcely finished dressing when Montagu Trixit entered from the shed.  Masterton looked at him with a new interest and a respect he had never felt before.  There certainly was little of the daughter in this keen-faced, resolute-lipped man, though his brown eyes, like hers, had the same frank, steadfast audacity.  With a business brevity that was hurried but not unkindly, he hoped Masterton had fully recovered.

“Thanks to your daughter, I’m all right now,” said Masterton.  “I need not tell you that I believe I owe my life to her energy and courage, for I think you have experienced what she can do in that way.  But you have had the advantage of those who have only enjoyed her social acquaintance in knowing all the time what she was capable of,” he added significantly.

“She is a good girl,” said Trixit briefly, yet with a slight rise in color on his dark, sallow cheek, and a sudden wavering of his steadfast eyes.  “She tells me you have a message from your directors.  I think I know what it is, but we won’t discuss it now.  As I am going directly to Sacramento, I shall not see them, but I will give you an answer to take to them when we reach the station.  I am going to give you a lift there when my daughter is ready.  And here she is.”