is a single word that can't be made out. It is
lucky it didn't prolong its bath, though, isn't it? All we need to do,
now, is to put it in the sun to dry for a few minutes."

Selecting a sunny spot near by, she arranged the volume against a stone
and deftly separated the pages so that the air could circulate more
freely between them; and one would have said, from her manner of ready
assurance, that she had learned from long experience exactly how to dry
a manuscript that had been thrown in the river and rescued just in the
nick of time. That was Betty Jo's way. She always did everything without
hesitation,--just as though she had spent the twenty-three years of her
life doing exactly that particular thing.

Kneeling over the manuscript, and gently moving the wet sheets, she
said, without looking up: "Do you always bath your manuscripts like this
before you turn them over to your stenographer to type, Mr. Burns?"

In spite of his troubled state of mind, Brian smiled.

The clear, matter-of-fact voice went on, while the competent hands
moved the drying pages. "You see, I never worked for an author before. I
suspect I have a lot to learn."

She looked up at him with a Betty Jo smile that went straight to his
heart, as Betty Jo's smiles had a curious way of doing.

"I hope you will be very patient with me, Mr. Burns. You will, won't
you? There is no real danger of your throwing ME in the river when the
'artistic temperament' possesses you, is there?"

It was no use. When Betty Jo set out to make a man talk, that man
talked. Brian yielded not ungracefully: "I owe you an apology, Miss
Williams," he said.

"Indeed, no," Betty Jo returned, giving her attention to the manuscript
again. "It is easy to see that you are terribly upset about something;
and everybody is so accustomed to being upset in one way or another that
apologies for upsetments are quite an unnecessary bother, aren't they?"

That was another interestingly curious thing about Betty Jo,--the way
she could finish off a characteristic, matter-of-fact statement with a
question which had the effect of making one agree instantly whether one
agreed or not.

Brian felt himself quite unexpectedly feeling that "upsetments" were
quite common, ordinary, and to be expected events in one's life. "But I
am really in very serious trouble, Miss Williams," he said in a way that
sounded oddly to Brian himself, as though he were trying to convince
himself that his trouble