THE PAPER MOON.
By L. C. HOBART,
Author of “The Silken Scarf.”
Crown 8 vo. 7 s. 6 d. net.
Miss Hobart’s second novel is in every way stronger and more interesting than her first. The plot is well constructed and developed with much emotional power. She has the gift of bringing her characters and their setting vividly before the reader, and communicates the strong sympathy and antipathy she herself feels for them.
The book opens amid idyllic surroundings on Dartmoor, but the scene soon shifts to a certain house in Chelsea, in outward appearance not different from its neighbours, but pregnant with some strange uncanny influence, some dimly apprehended evil lurking in the background, waiting for the moment of consummation. This malign atmosphere, the tense expectancy, the breathless suspense, Miss Hobart renders most vividly.
The inhabitants of the house are Jonathan Fane and his son Greville; from them also there seems to emanate a mysterious suggestion of hidden evil, of menace that may become reality. Greville is the villain of the story: he is a man who exercises irresistible fascination over the opposite sex, and first April Arless, then Rachel Strangways fall victims to his Mephistophelean attractions. In strong contrast with Greville is his cousin, Jake Fane, who is also in love with Rachel, and the characters of these two men typify the forces of good and evil which contend for mastery throughout the book.
THE BIRTHMARK.
By ALAN SULLIVAN.
Crown 8 vo. 7 s. 6 d. net.
To Molding-on-the-Ooze, in “the lowest, flattest and dampest section of the Midlands,” the seat of Henry Hardinger, Esq., come Colonel and Mrs. Bostwick, desiring its owner as a husband for their daughter Grace. Henry (who looks on life “as something between a polo match and a satiric comedy”) has no money: the Colonel has no money: each is ignorant of the other’s want: each sees in Grace a solution of his difficulty. Every one takes a hand in the game of deceits, and as all concerned are both deceivers and deceived, the complications and the fun can be imagined.
