BY BERTAL HEENEY.
PICKANOCK: A Tale of Settlement Days in Olden Canada. Crown 8vo. 6/-
BY MURIEL HINE.
APRIL PANHASARD. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-
⁂ Lady Essendine is reluctantly compelled to divorce her unfaithful husband, who has developed into a dipsomaniac. She is naturally distressed by the scandal her action carries, and flies to Coddle-in-the-Dale, where she hopes to hide her identity under the name of April Panhasard—a name chosen casually from the titles of three novels at a railway station bookstall, "Young April," "Peter Pan," "The Hazard of the Die." In the quiet village she moves a sweet and gracious figure, serenely indifferent to the curiosity of those who try to penetrate the mystery that surrounds her. Only Boris Majendie, who poses as her cousin, is in her confidence. Her quiet is speedily disturbed. A young American, to whom she is strangely drawn, makes her a proposal of marriage. Boris runs more than a little wild, although he leaves her his larger devotion. Finally her divorced husband turns up, and she is left in an intensely compromising situation, for the necessary six months have not yet elapsed to make the decree absolute. How she frees herself from this curious tangle must be left for the reader to find out.
The book is alive with incident, but it has the rare quality of restraint, which prevents it from ever merging into the melodramatic, and the characters are all drawn with rare artistic skill.
HALF IN EARNEST. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6/-
⁂ Derrick Kilmarney, the secretary of a famous politician, is a young man with the disposition to take the best that life offers him, and shirk the responsibilities. He falls in love with a girl, but shudders at the idea of the bondage of marriage. His love is emancipated, unfettered. He is ambitious, politically, allows himself to become entangled with his chief's wife, and is too indolent to break with her even in justice to the girl he loves. Eventually there comes a time when all the threads have to be gathered together, when love has to be weighed with ambition, and in Kilmarney's case the denounement is unexpected and startling.
EARTH. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6/-