of spumy wrack there emerged
a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on instantly the
sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida
Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self,
Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage
vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so
well known how to simulate but the real face of the real woman, who lay
dead and buried under a mound of fresh-cut sods seventy miles away--her
own face, melancholy and sadly placid, as God had fashioned it for her.

Out from the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its
half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and
clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white--fit
grave clothes for one lately entombed--with great masses of loosened
black hair falling like a pall about the passionless brooding face; and
now lifting reproachful eyes, it looked out across the intervening void
of blackness into their staring eyes, and from the folds of the cerement
robes raised a bare arm high as though to forbid a lying sacrilege. And
stood there then as a wraith newly freed from the burying mold, filling
and dominating the picture so that one looking saw nothing else save the
shrouded figure and the head and the face and those eyes and that upheld
white arm.

Cowering low in his seat with a sleeve across his eyes to shut out the
accusing apparition, Mr. Geltfin whispered between chattering teeth: "I
told him! I told him the dead could maybe come back!"

Mr. Quinlan, a bolder nature but even so terribly shaken, was muttering
to himself: "But it wasn't in the negative! I swear to God it wasn't in
the negative!"

It is probable that Mr. Lobel heard neither of them, or if he heard he
gave no heed. He had a feeling that the darkness was smothering him.

"Shut off the machine!" he roared as he wrenched his body free of the
snug opera chair in which he sat. "And turn on the lights in this
room--quick! And let me out of here--quick!"

Lunging into the darkness he stumbled over Appel's legs and tumbled
headlong out into the narrow aisle. On all fours as the lights flashed
on, he gave in a choking bellow his commands.

"Burn that print--you hear me, burn it now! And then burn the negative
too! Quick you burn it, like I am telling you!"

"But, Lobel, I'll swear to the negative!" protested Quinlan, jealous
even i