do you want them, and must it be exactly this same quality of paper?”
“I want five thousand of each altogether, but you could do it in lots of five hundred. I want the first lot delivered next Monday by the Tangiteroria steamer. The paper doesn’t have to be identical, but the nearest you can do.”
“Can you wait till this afternoon for an estimate? You can get the Auckland mail to-night if you don’t like our offer.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. I’m going to be here all day. I’ll come in about three o’clock. Good-morning,” and he walked out.
Valerie hurried in to Johnson.
“I don’t know what I’ve let you in for. But come and look at this.”
They spread the sheets out on a bench. Johnson saw at once it was far and away the best job the place had produced, that it was indeed a good hard one, a real test of what he could do. It warmed Valerie to see how keen he was to do it. They called Ryder into the conference.
“We haven’t the paper,” he said.
She looked woefully disappointed. But a search disclosed a few sheets that would do as a specimen. Johnson wrote out an urgent telegram to a printing house in Auckland as to the possibility of getting paper up the next day, and Jimmy rushed off with it to the post-office. Johnson and Ryder dropped what they were doing, and started to work out a scale of prices based on day and overtime rates.
“Would you work overtime on it?” asked Valerie.
“You bet, rather than lose it,” answered Johnson. “But you will have the worst of it, Miss Carr. It will be a beastly thing to read.”
When Townshend walked in at three o’clock she was
