ry about her
noticing anything strange about you. I'll attend to her."

And the next minute, Betty Jo had the dear old lady in her arms.

CHAPTER XV.

A MATTER OF BUSINESS.

The weeks that followed the coming of Betty Jo to the little log house
by the river passed quickly for Brian Kent. Perhaps it was the peculiar
circumstances of their first meeting that made the man feel so strongly
that he had known her for many years, instead of for only those few
short weeks. That could easily have been the reason, because the
young woman had stepped so suddenly into his life at a very critical
time;--when his mental faculties were so confused by the turmoil and
suffering of his emotional self that the past was to him, at the moment,
far more real than the present.

And Betty Jo had not merely come into his life casually, as a
disinterested spectator; but, by the peculiar appeal of herself, she
had led Brian to take her so into his confidence that she had become
immediately a very real part of the experience through which he was then
passing, and thus was identified with his past experience out of which
the crisis of the moment had come.

Again Betty Jo, in the naturalness of her manner toward him, and by her
matter-of-fact, impersonal consideration of his perplexing situation,
had brought to his unsettled and chaotic mind a sense of stability and
order; and by subtly insinuating her own practical decisions as to the
course he should follow, had made herself a very literal part of his
inner life. In fact, Betty Jo knew Brian Kent more intimately at the
close of their first meeting than she could have known him after years
of acquaintanceship under the ordinary course of development.

Brian's consciousness of this would naturally cause him to feel toward
the young woman as though she had long been a part of his life. Still
other causes might have contributed to the intimate companionship that
so quickly became to them both an established and taken-for-granted
fact; but, the circumstances of their first meeting, given, of course,
their peculiar individualities, were, really, quite enough. The fact
that it was springtime might also have had something to do with it.

The morning after her arrival, Betty Jo set to work typing the
manuscript. Brian went to his work on the timbered hillside. In the
evenings, Brian worked over the typewitten pages,--revising, correcting,
perfecting,--and then, as Betty Jo made the final cop