ore this bench is in the shade?" she
asked him next.

"Half an hour,--maybe a little longer." Pete glanced again anxiously
upward.

"And--how long do these spasms usually last?" Jean's head tilted toward
Robert Grant Burns as impersonally as if she were indicating a horse
with colic.

But the camera man had gone as far as was wise, if he cared to continue
working for Burns, and he made no reply whatever. So Jean turned her
attention to the man whose bulk shaded her from the sun, and whose
remarks would have been wholly unforgivable had she not chosen to
ignore them.

"If you really are anxious to go on making pictures, why don't you stop
all that ranting and be sensible about it?" she asked him. "You can't
bully me into being afraid of you, you know. And really, you are
making an awful spectacle of yourself, going on like that."

"Listen here! Are you going to get off that bench and out of the
scene?" By a tremendous effort Robert Grant Burns spoke that sentence
with a husky kind of calm.

"That all depends upon yourself, Mr. Burns. First, I want to know by
what right you come here with your picture-making. You haven't
explained that yet, you know."

The highest paid director of the Great Western Film Company looked at
her long. With her head tilted back, Jean returned the look.

"Oh, all right--all right," he surrendered finally. "Read that paper.
That ought to satisfy you that we ain't trespassing here or anywhere
else. And if you'd kindly,"--and Mr. Burns emphasized the word
"kindly,"--"remove yourself to some other spot that is just as
comfortable--"

Jean did not even hear him, once she had the paper in her hands and had
begun to read it. So Robert Grant Burns folded his arms across his
heaving chest and watched her and studied her and measured her with his
mind while she read. He saw the pulling together of her eyebrows, and
the pinching of her under-lip between her teeth. He saw how she
unconsciously sheltered the little brown bird under her left hand in
her lap because she must hold the paper with the other, and he quite
forgot his anger against her.

Sitting so, she made a picture that appealed to him. Had you asked him
why, he would have said that she was the type that would photograph
well, and that she had a screen personality; which would have been high
praise indeed, coming from him.

Jean read the brief statement that in consideration of a certain sum
paid to him that day by R