would be plenty of room for Pard and
Lite's horse and another which Robert Grant Burns had used to carry him
to locations in rough country, where the automobile could not go. The
car would run in passenger service, Burns said,--he'd fix that,--so
Lite would be right with the company all the way out.

Jean appreciated all that as a personal favor, which merely proved how
unsophisticated she really was. She did not know that Robert Grant
Burns was thinking chiefly of furnishing material for the publicity man
to use in news stories. She never once dreamed that the coming of
"Jean, of the Lazy A" and Jean's pet horse Pard, and of Lite, who had
done so many surprising things in the picture, would be heralded in all
the Los Angeles papers before ever they left Montana.

Jean was concerned chiefly with attending to certain matters which
seemed to her of vital importance. If she must go, there was something
which she must do first,--something which for three years she had
shrunk from doing. So she told Robert Grant Burns that she would meet
him and his company in Helena, and without a word of explanation, she
left two days in advance of them, just after she had had another
maddening talk with her Uncle Carl, wherein she had repeated her
intention of employing a lawyer.

When she boarded the train at Helena, she did not tell even Lite just
where she had been or what she had been doing. She did not need to
tell Lite. He looked into her face and saw there the shadow of the
high, stone wall that shut her dad away from the world, and he did not
ask a single question.

CHAPTER XIX

IN LOS ANGELES

When she felt bewildered, Jean had the trick of appearing merely
reserved; and that is what saved her from the charge of rusticity when
Robert Grant Burns led her through the station gateway and into a small
reception. No less a man than Dewitt, President of the Great Western
Film Company, clasped her hand and held it, while he said how glad he
was to welcome her. Jean, unawed by his greatness and the honor he was
paying her, looked up at him with that distracting little beginning of
a smile, and replied with that even-more distracting little drawl in
her voice, and wondered why Mrs. Gay should become so plainly flustered
all at once.

Dewitt took her by the arm, introduced her to a curious-eyed group with
a warming cordiality of manner, and led her away through a crowd that
stared and whispered, and up to a great, be