A Late Awakening. By Maggie Swan. (Ward, Lock, and Co.)
—We have not often read a more melancholy story than A Late Awakening. A stern, intellectual Scotch minister marries the daughter of a dead friend to give her a home. It is a sudden resolve, and turns out to be a mistake. She flies from home, lacking sympathy, and when at last she goes back, worn out with the struggle for existence, she dies before she can meet him. Dunbar does not acknowledge the dead woman to be his wife till one day the child forces it from his lips. Too late has he awakened to what he has missed. Marjory is a moat natural, emotional, and simple character—a very touching and pathetic figure—but Dunbar is too rigid even for a Scotch minister. His repentance might well have come a little earlier, and so softened the iron character of his selfishness and harrowed our feeliaga less.
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