The Girl He Did Not Marry. By Iza Duffus Hardy.
(Hutchin- son and Co.)—A heroine who three times just fails to bring her engagement to a successful conclusion, is a difficult subject to manage in a novel, as she would doubtless be in real life. The situation is, we think, a mistake, though the author writes well and rises to some of her opportunities. But one begins to tire of the poor girl's ill-luck, and sympathy is not so readily evoked the third time as it is the first. There are plenty of subordinate characters in the book, mostly with love-stories, and the writer deserves some praise for the manner in which she infuses vitality into them while not neglecting the heroine. The story is a readable one, but the main feature of the plot is overdone, and strikes a rather dismal con- trast with the general cheeriness and movement of the rest.
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