Listen! The dead they don't come back. When just
now you made your spiel, that part of it which you said about the dead
coming back didn't worry me. It was the part which you said about the
public not standing for it that got me, because for once, anyhow, in
your life you were right and I give you right. But what the public don't
know don't hurt 'em. And the public won't know. You leave it to me!"

It was as though this argument had been a mighty arm outstretched to
shove him over the edge. Geltfin ceased to teeter on the brim--he fell
in. He nodded in surrender and Lobel quit patting him on the back to
wave the vice president into activity.

"Quinlan," he ordered as he might order an office boy, "get busy! Tell
'em to rush The She-Demon! Tell 'em to rush the subtitles and all! Tell
'em to rush out an announcement that the big fillum is going to be
released two months before expected--on account the demand of the public
is so strong to see sooner the greatest vampire feature ever fillumed."

Quinlan was no office boy, but he obeyed as smartly as might any newly
hired office boy.

If it was Mr. Lobel's genius which guided the course of action,
energizing and speeding it, neither could it be denied that circumstance
and yet again circumstance and on top of that more circumstance matched
in with hue and shade to give protective coloration to his plan.
Continued success for it as time should pass seemed assured and
guaranteed, seeing that Vida Monte, beyond the studios and off the
locations, had all her life walked a way so secluded, so inconspicuous
and so utterly commonplace that no human being, whether an attache of
the company or an outsider, would be likely to miss her, or missing her,
to pry deeply into the causes for her absence. So much for the
contingencies of the future as those in the secret foresaw it. As for
the present, that was simplicity.

As quietly as she had moved in those earlier professional days of hers,
when she played small roles in provincial stock companies; as quietly as
she had gone on living after film fame and film money came her way; as
quietly as she had laid her down and died, so--very quietly--was her
body put away in the little cemetery at Hamletsburg. To the physician
who had ministered to her, to his good-hearted wife, to the official who
issued the burial certificate, to the imported clergyman who held the
service, to the few villagers who gathered for the funeral, drawn by the