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“Should people ask questions, why then through the papers we give it out that Miss Vida Monte is gone far off away somewhere for a long rest; that maybe she don’t take no more pictures for a long time. That should make The She-Demon go all the better. And to-morrow up there in that little rube town very quietly we bury Sarah Glassman, deceased, with the burial certificate made out in her own name.” He paused a moment to enjoy his triumph. “Boys, when I myself think out something, am I right or am I wrong?”

He answered his own question.

“I’m right!”

By the look on Quinlan’s face he read conviction, consent, full and hearty approval. But Geltfin wavered. Inside Geltfin superstition wrestled with opposing thoughts. Upon him then Lobel, the master mind, advanced, dominating the scene and the situation and determined also to dominate the lesser personality.

“But–but say–but look here now, Lobel,” stammered Geltfin, hesitating on the verge of a decision, “she might come back.”

“Geltfin,” commanded Lobel, “you should please shut up. Do you want that we should make a lot of money or do you want that we should lose a lot of money? I ask you. 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 morbid lure which in isolated communities brings folk to any funeral–to all of these the dead woman merely was a stranger with a strange name who, temporarily abiding here, had fallen victim to the plague which filled the land.