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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 in his fright for his own vindication. “If you’ll look at the neg–“

“I wouldn’t touch it for a million dollars!” roared Lobel. “Burn it up, I tell you! And bury the ashes!”

Still choking, still bellowing, he scrambled to his feet, an ungainly embodiment of mortal agitation, and ran for the door. But Mr. Geltfin beat him to it and through it, Quinlan and Appel following in the order named.

Outside their chief fell up against a wall, panting and wheezing for breath, his face swollen and all congested with purple spots. They thought he was about to have a stroke or a seizure of some sort. But they were wrong. This merely was Nature’s warning to a man with a size seventeen neckband and a forty-six-inch girth measurement. The stroke he was to have on the following day.

Probably Quinlan and Geltfin as experienced business men should have known better than to come bursting together into the office of a stout middle-aged man who so lately had suffered a considerable nervous shock and still was unstrung; and having after such unseemly fashion burst in, then to blurt out their tidings in concert without first by soft and soothing words preparing their hearer’s system to receive the tidings they bore. But themselves, they were upset by what they just had learned and so perhaps may be pardoned for a seeming unthoughtfulness. Both speaking at once, both made red of face and vehement by mingled emotions of rage and chagrin, each nourishing a perfectly natural and human desire to place the blame for a catastrophe on shoulders other than their own two pairs, they sought to impart the tale they brought. Ensued for an exciting moment a baffling confusion of tongues.

“It was that Josephson done it–the mousy little sneak!”

These words became intelligible as Quinlan, exerting his superior vocal powers, dinned out the sputtering inarticulate accents of Geltfin.

“He fixed it so that you’d spill the beans, Lobel! He fixed The She-Demon–Josephson. And me trusting him!

“How should I be knowing that all this time him and that girl was secretly engaged to be married? How should I be knowing that he would find out for himself the day after the funeral that she was dead and yet never say a word about it? How should I be knowing that he would have all tucked away somewhere a roll of film showing her dressed up like a madonna or a saint or a martyr or a ghost or something which he took privately one time when they was out together on location–slipping away with her and taking ’em without nobody knowing about it? How should I be knowing that without tipping his hand he would cook up the idea to work a slick fake on you, Lobel, and scare you into killing off the whole thing? How should I be knowing that while he was on the printing machine all by himself the other night that he would work the old double exposure stunt and throw such a scare into you in the projecting room yesterday?”