‘You look painfully worried, Jem. What’s gone wrong now?’
Doctor Jem Russell, head of the Sonnalpe Sanatorium in Tyrol, glanced at his young sister-in-law, Jo Bettany, with a worried air indeed, but he shook his head at her question, and refused to give her a definite answer, much to her suppressed wrath.
‘There are a good many things to worry me, Jo. Don’t bother me now, that’s a good girl. Instead, suppose you go and get some of the ink off your fingers? Have you been bathing in it by any chance?’
Jo regarded her stained fingers ruefully. ‘I don’t know where it all comes from. That wretched pen of mine doesn’t seem to leak, and yet I always get into a mess like this when I’ve been really busy.’
‘Perhaps,’ suggested the doctor, who knew her, ‘you’ve been dipping it into the ink instead of taking the trouble of filling it properly.’
Jo went pink. ‘I did think it a waste of time when I was in the middle of my new chapter,’ she acknowledged with engaging frankness.