Perils." she answered with a jaunty affectation of
amusement. "The Touchstone-Blatz people sent it back. The slip says its
being returned does not imply any lack of merit."

"I should think it wouldn't!" said Merton warmly.

He knew Passion's Perils. A company might have no immediate need for it,
but its rejection could not possibly imply a lack of merit, because the
merit was there. No one could dispute that.

They walked on to the Bijou Palace. Its front was dark, for only twice
a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, could Simsbury muster a picture
audience; but they could read the bills for the following night. The
entrance was flanked on either side by billboards, and they stopped
before the first. Merton Gill's heart quickened its beats, for there
was billed none other than Beulah Baxter in the ninth installment of her
tremendous serial, The Hazards of Hortense.

It was going to be good! It almost seemed that this time the scoundrels
would surely get Hortense. She was speeding across a vast open quarry in
a bucket attached to a cable, and one of the scoundrels with an ax
was viciously hacking at the cable's farther anchorage. It would be a
miracle if he did not succeed in his hellish design to dash Hortense to
the cruel rocks below. Merton, of course, had not a moment's doubt that
the miracle would intervene; he had seen other serials. So he made no
comment upon the gravity of the situation, but went at once to the heart
of his ecstasy.

"The most beautiful woman on the screen," he murmured.

"Well, I don't know."

Miss Kearns appeared about to advance the claims of rival beauties, but
desisted when she saw that Merton was firm.

"None of the rest can touch her," he maintained. "And look at her nerve!
Would your others have as much nerve as that?"

"Maybe she has someone to double in those places," suggested the
screen-wise Tessie Kearns.

"Not Beulah Baxter. Didn't I see her personal appearance that time I
went to Peoria last spring on purpose to see it? Didn't she talk about
the risks she look and how the directors were always begging her to use
a double and how her artistic convictions wouldn't let her do any such
thing? You can bet the little girl is right there in every scene!"

They passed to the other billboard. This would be the comedy. A
painfully cross-eyed man in misfitting clothes was doing something
supposed to be funny--pushing a lawn mower over the carpet of a palatial
home.

"How disgusti