TRESPASSERS IN PARADISE. By Blanche Winder. Chapman and Hall. 7s.
6d.)—Here is a tender uncon- ventional story, set in beautiful places, with a certain crystalline purity of appeal. The manner is not unprac- tised; but it is unstaled. Cezira, a child like a Bottieelli angel, grows wild and sweet in an island in Lake Maggiore. Her father, a highly Bohemian painter, hires her out as a model, her vague English mother, who had eloped with him and regretted it, being dead. Ralph Gabriel, an English painter, engages her, is perplexed by her innocence, delights in her winged fanciful motions, and, quite unaware that she is only fifteen, takes all that her childish adoration will give. The texture of this early episode is gracious and idyllic : Ralph's moody spirit is well understood. The War restores Cezira to her wealthy English grandfather ; Ralph marries her cousin Norah, his early love, who, however, merely accepts him because she is piqued with the cautious puritan William Farrington. He is wedded to the sad sub- missive Cezira ; but his passion is really for his lovely old Elizabethan manor of Christscroft. In the end Cezira and Ralph come together again ! One has a sense of a tangle of people, all very much alive and none without some sympathetic q Sty, existing in warm bright places. The siren caves of Maggiore, the gracious dignity of the Breton chilteau, yield their magic to the writer. But her sense of natural beauty takes most delightful play among the hills, lawns, and uplands of the Cumbrian and Westmorland country. She has a. wonderful eye for birds ; and in some passages the immediacy of bird-music and gorse-fragrance becomes in- toxicating. Cezira herself, always anelie,al, candid, and sweetly amusing, even when she is hurt, is the most charming thing in a book as refreshing as a holiday that combines the excitement of foreign places with the clear air of the country- side.
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