The Wild Olive. By the Author of "The Inner Shrine."
(Methuen and Co. 6s.)—This novel begins in an admirable fashion with the escape of a young man wrongfully condemned to death for murder, and his subsequent rescue by a girl. The whole story is American ; but there is of course nothing American in the situation, which might conceivably happen anywhere. The cleverness of the book consists in the description of the young man's frame of mind when he has under a false name become a respect- able citizen in Buenos Ayres. The inevitable coincidence of fiction causes him to fall in love with an American girl closely connected with the Miriam who helped his escape, and his engage- ment with this girl makes him risk a return to New York. In the end the intolerableness of living a false life drives him to confess to his employers and to break off his connexion with the Argentine. The last chapter leaves him in the hands of the police, but as his innocence has already been proved the reader will have no misgivings concerning his ultimate end. Recited thus baldly the plot may seem commonplace, but it is redeemed from this fault by the analysis of the process • by which material success under a false name becomes unimportant in the eyes of the hero compared with restoration to his rightful place in society. The book is a clever study of temperament, and the reader cannot fail to be grateful to an author who thinks it necessary to construct an interesting story while his main object is the delineation of character.
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