Until the Day Breaks. By Emily Spender. 3 vols. (Hurst
and Blackett.)—There is some power and not a little sadness about this story. Cecilia Trenaayne has her love-story, and it ends in nothing. After living untouched to the age of thirty, though she is good and beautiful and has expectations, she loses her heart to an Irish patriot who is working out his sentence at Portland. But the Irish patriot, unlike Mr. D. C. Murray's fortune-hunting hero, has no love but for his country. And she has her family story, and this is not less un- satisfactory. She is the daughter of a man of good family who has made a mesalliance, and has been brought up on the understanding, unknown to her, that she is to have nothing to do with her mother. But the mother turns up ; the daughter makes her choice for her, and against the uncle who has adopted her, and fieds that she is not happy. And the end of it all is equally a failure. It was, perhaps, a happy delusion that she was dying for Ireland ; but it was certainly a delusion. It is quite true that all this well represents one phase of human life. There are people who, richly gifted, it would seem, by Nature and fortune, do yet fail throughout. But their lives do not make a story that is good to read, unless they are handled with more genius than Mrs. Spender, with all her ability, can command. This particular novel is not made more attractive just now by Mrs. Spender's very fierce and, it seems to us, unreasoning partisanship.
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