22 FEBRUARY 1902, Page 25

The Cat's Paw. By B. M. Croker. (Chatto and Windus.

6s.) —Mrs. Croker is always lively and entertaining. But in her latest novel, The Cat's Paw, she is even more than usually interesting. By a very ingenious device she has contrived an original plot, of which the twists and turns take her heroine and her readers into scenes of Indian life not generally touched upon in the Anglo-Indian novel of society. The heroine is a girl of strong character and plenty of pluck. With just cause, she refuses, on arriving in India, to marry the man she has oome out to be joined to, and having offended her friends and his, is throw's upon the resources of her pride and her coursto. All ends wall, and Pamela Evans is rewarded at the close of the story with a much better husband than the one she jilted. And in the interval she see much life, first in a plague camp, then in a Eurasian boarding-house, and at last in a Rajah's palace. There are many nice people in the book, and some who are not nice at all. But the handling is wholesome, human, and genial throughout.