With an eagerness intensified to a childish impatience, almost, by the vague suggestions of Gratz that the story would be personally interesting, and exhausting his mind with futile speculations as to the manner of its application to the unnatural conditions which distressed him so, Raikes at last concluded his contemplation of the clock, and promptly upon the stroke of ten, hastened from his room and hurried to the apartment occupied by the Sepoy. Seating himself in the chair indicated by his host, he shortly found that he was unable to avoid recalling his recent guilty appropriation of the diamond, and a degree of confusion, which he could not entirely disguise, manifested itself in his difficulty of adjusting his eyes to the inscrutable gaze of the Sepoy. On this occasion the narrator, as hitherto, did not provide his auditor with a brilliant to look upon during the progress of the story--an omission that was radiantly repaired by the two lambent gems in the eyes of the former. Upon these the shifting gaze of the restless listener finally fastened itself with a fascination which he found it impossible to resist, and the Sepoy, with all the modulated lights and shadows of ardor, animation, lethargy, somnolence, peace, with which he complemented his sedative phrases, began: (_The conclusion of this interesting tale will be found on Bosom No. 1, Dickey Series C_.) As Dennis looked up from his reading, a pair of eyes of unclouded blue, vivid with interest and altogether friendly, met his animated glance. With alert intuition his sweet-faced auditor believed that she discovered a shadow of vexation in the ingenuous countenance of the reader. "What is it?" she asked. To Dennis, in his absorption, it seemed impossible that the question could refer to anything else than the habitual disability at the end of each chapter, and he answered promptly: "'Tis the way the dickey ends--to be concluded in Series C--an' it's me here an' Series C in Baxter Street, so I can't read the rest; it's too bad, so it is." "So it is," repeated the lady softly, with a dexterous parody of his concluding words, but with a subtle intimation in her manner that she did not consider the inconvenient termination such a misfortune, after all, and that it somehow suggested an alternative that was not displeasing. "Do you want to hear the rest?" asked Dennis frankly. "I do, indeed," replied his companion with an adroitly conveyed insinuation of disappointed expectation that seemed to place the responsibility of measuring to this agreeable emergency entirely upon Dennis. The same degree of sensitiveness which leaves an Irishman so open to offense, enables him, with equal celerity, to comprehend a hint, and Dennis, when he realized that the lady understood that the continuation of the tale involved a subsequent reading, exclaimed, with a delicious paraphrase of Sancho Panza: "God bless the man who first invented '_Continued in our next!_'"