r. The reader should be tantalized; he should be made to long for
the fruit that is just beyond his grasp; and he should not be left in
ignorance as to the nature of the fruit, lest he should long for it
half-heartedly. A vague sense of "something evermore about to be" is
not as interesting to the reader as a vivid sense of the imminence
of some particular occurrence that he wishes ardently to witness. The
expedient of suspense is most effective when either of two things and
only two, both of which the reader has imagined in advance, is just
about to happen, and the reader, desirous of the one and apprehensive
of the other, is kept waiting while the balance trembles. In the
second place, there is seldom any use in making the reader wait
unless he is given in the end the thing he has been waiting for. A
short-story may occasionally set forth a suspense which is never to be
satisfied. Frank R. Stockton's famous tale, "The Lady or the Tiger?",
ends with a question which neither the reader nor the author is able
to answer; and Bayard Taylor's fascinating short-story, "Who Was
She?", never reveals the alluring secret of the heroine's identity.
But in an extended story an unsatisfied suspense is often less
emphatic than no suspense at all, because the reader in the end feels
cheated by the author who has made him wait for nothing. There are, of
course, exceptions to this statement. In "The Marble Faun," Hawthorne
is undoubtedly right in never revealing the shape of Donatello's ears,
even though the reader continually expects the revelation; but, in
the same novel, it is difficult to see what, if anything, is gained by
making the reader wait in vain for the truth about the shadowy past of
Miriam.

Emphasis in narrative may also be attained by imitative movement.
Whatever is imagined to have happened quickly should be narrated
quickly, in few words and in rapid rhythm; and whatever is imagined
to have happened slowly should be narrated in a more leisurely
manner,--sometimes in a greater number of words than are absolutely
necessitated by the sense alone,--the words being arranged,
furthermore, in a rhythm of appreciable sluggishness. In "Markheim,"
the dealer is murdered in a single sudden sentence: "The long,
skewerlike dagger flashed and fell." But, later on in the story,
it takes the hero a whole paragraph, containing no less than three
hundred words, to mount the four-and-twenty steps to the first floor
of the house. In th