proper relations provided for it. Thus the writer may wish to use
incidents that belong to two separate stories, because he knows
that by relating them he can produce a single effect. Shakespeare
does this in Macbeth. Finding in the lives of the historic Macbeth
and the historic King Duff incidents that he wished to use, he
combined them. But he saw to it that they had the right relation,
that they fitted into the chain of cause and effect. The reader
will insist, as the writer knows, that the story be logical, that
incident 1 shall be the cause of incident 2, incident 2 of
incident 3, and so on to the end. The triangle used by Freytag to
illustrate the plot of a play may make this clear.

AC is the line of rising action along which the story climbs,
incident by incident, to the point C; C is the turning point, the
crisis, or the climax; CB is the line of falling action along
which the story descends incident by incident to its logical
resolution. Nothing may be left to luck or chance. In life the
element of chance does sometimes seem to figure, but in the story
it has no place. If the ending is not the logical outcome of
events, the reader feels cheated. He does not want the situation
to be too obvious, for he likes the thrill of suspense. But he
wants the hints and foreshadowings to be sincere, so that he may
safely draw his conclusions from them. This does not condemn,
however, the "surprise" ending, so admirably used by O. Henry. The
reader, in this case, admits that the writer has "played fair"
throughout, and that the ending which has so surprised and tickled
his fancy is as logical as that he had forecast.

To aid in securing the element of suspense, the author often makes
use of what Carl H. Grabo, in his The Art of the Short Story,