s Vila," said Buckingham,
"for I see I have spoiled the game."

"It is nothing," said she.

She had said nothing, but she had said it with a singularly musical
voice, and, after all, it is not the significant words but the
significant tones which touch one.

"No. It is nothing," he repeated. "A game may always be interrupted,
because it is not the conclusion but the playing which gives it any
value. I suspect it is like the stories we read,--somebody comes in, and
we lay the book down before we come to the end. It is no great matter if
we never take it up again. We got our pleasure, not from knowing how
things turned out, but from knowing things." He blushed a little as he
said this. In fact, his own inchoate story came to his mind. Besides,
Miss Vila had his card. Since she read so constantly, it was odds but
she knew of him. He blushed a little more as this thought crossed his
mind.

"Do you think so?" she asked, and her downcast eyes were suddenly
up-turned in full, the look which he had often patiently watched for as
he had seen her in the horse-car. "I find the end necessary. If I stop
half-way I think I have done the story-teller an injustice. I have not
given him the chance to tell me all he intended to tell me. He lets out
the secret of his characters by degrees. He could justly say to me, 'You
do not know the heroine; you have not seen her in that scene which is
going to test her.'"

"You are quite right," said Buckingham, "if you really think you are
under any obligation to the story-teller."

"Why, of course I am," she exclaimed, with wide-open surprise. Then she
blushed in turn,--first a little color of half-indignant rebuke, then a
warm hue as she thought of her unnecessary earnestness, then a deep
crimson as there rushed over her the sudden recollection of the hours
she had spent in Buckingham's company, and the silent admiration which
she had bestowed from the shelter of ignorance upon this gentleman who
now sat composedly before her. It was by an effort of self-control that
she did not spring from her seat and leave the room. The effort blanched
her face. It was as she sat thus, her eyes cast down, her lips set, her
countenance pale, that Mrs. Martindale returned.

IX.

THE UNNECESSARY HERO.

"My cousin will be here presently," she said, as she entered the room.
And then her eye fell on Miss Vila and glanced quickly at Mr.
Buckingham, who was nervously fingering his stick. "Meanwhile," she