re not to his liking.
He adjusted himself now to the idea of making Jean the Western star his
employers seemed to think was inevitable.

That night before he went to bed he wrote a play which had in it
fifty-two scenes. Thirty-five of them were what is known technically
as exteriors. In most of them Jean was to ride on horseback through
wild places. The rest were dramatic close-ups. Robert Grant Burns
went over it carefully when it was finished, and groaning inwardly he
cut out two love scenes which were tense, and which Muriel Gay and Lee
Milligan would have "eaten up," as he mentally expressed it. The love
interest, he realized bitterly, must be touched upon lightly in his
scenarios from now on; which would have lightened appreciably the heart
of Lite Avery, if he had only known it, and would have erased from his
mind a good many depressing visions of Jean as the film sweetheart of
those movie men whom he secretly hated.

Jean did not hesitate five minutes before she signed the contract which
Burns presented to her the next morning. She was human, and she had
learned enough about the business to see that, speaking from a purely
professional point of view, she was extremely fortunate. Not every
girl, surely, can hope to jump in a few weeks from the lowly position
of an inexperienced "extra" to the supposedly exalted one of leading
woman. And to her that hundred dollars a week which the contract
insured her looked a fortune. It spelled home to her, and the
vindication of her beloved dad, of whom she dared not think sometimes,
it hurt her so.

Her book was not progressing as fast as she had expected when she began
it. She had been working at it sporadically now for eight weeks, and
she had only ten chapters done,--and some of these were terribly short.
She had looked through all of the novels that she owned, and had
computed the average number of chapters in each; thirty she decided
would be a good, conservative number to write. She had even divided
those thirty into three parts, and had impartially allotted ten to
adventure, ten to mystery and horror, and ten to love-making. Such an
arrangement should please everybody, surely, and need only be worked
out smoothly to prove most satisfying.

But, as it happened, comedy would creep into the mystery and horror,
which she mentally lumped together as agony. Adventure ran riot, and
straight love-making chapters made her sleepy, they bored her so. She
had tried