A VAGABOND HEROINE.* IF there were but more novellettes like

this, what a refreshment in every sense a novellette would be. It is humorous, vivid, rapid, lavish, and yet brief ; unconventional almost to dash, and yet in no sense immoral in its tendency. It is meant to fill an interval be- tween work and work, but it fills that interval with something that remains in your memory with a charm and a piquancy, and yet not an artificial piquancy, of its own. The present time is a slow time,— we do not mean, of course, a time deficient in the fastness of lawless youth ; but even that very fastness is in a sense slow, and seems to in- volve a morbid chewing of the cud of pleasure which is self-conscious and not natural or fresh. Even the best genius of the day, even its best humour, is analytic, self-conscious, reflective. It is spectral with Hawthorne, or probing with Thackeray, or carefully rich and ample with George Eliot. But A Vagabond Heroine is not slow after any fashion. Its descriptive power is rapid, buoyant, breezy. Its humour is laughing, careless, very mischievous. Its passion is—not too deep—but healthy, eager, innocent. We do not say the brief story is very natural. Captain

* 4 Vagabond Heroine. By Mrs. Edwardee. London: Bentley and Son. Temple would hardly have offered to the empty beauty who as a- married woman had not only entangled him as a young man,,

but who had married again while he was supposed to be waiting for the proper time to elapse before be should make his proposal : and least of all would he have offered to her under the circum- stances described, when he had found out the widow, and

discovered her to be an elderly, " over-drest or undrest, aa you like to term it," bare-shouldered, and frisky syren, with the rouge on her cheek and the dye on her hair, and anxioue

to entangle him for the second time during what she believed to be her second widowhood. We do not praise this little story for the probability of its main circumstances, but for the extraordinary life, vivacity, and effect with which the contrast is drawn between the empty, though far from bad, conventional stepmother, with her silly vanity and exigeance, and the slipshod, unconventional stepdaughter, with her slovenly frock and old sandals, her appetite for macaroons, her delight in bolero-dancing and paume-playing, her reckless gossip, her hatred of intellectual make-belief, her mischievous pleasure in teasing the conventional Jones and the conventional stepmamma, and her affectionate' heart. This contrast is quite substance enough for the novel- lette, set off as it is by buoyant littlI3 sallies against the strong- minded lady who believes in the woman of the future, and the- vulgar youth who believes in the money of the present, and by sketches of scenery and places on the Spanish border of France as picturesque as ever proceeded from the brightest of sunny imaginations, and very much swifter than most of them-. This is the charm of the book. It is not hurried, but its current is full and eager. It makes you feel boyish again to read of poor Belinda's temptations, and scrapes, and anger, and love. The scene in which she dresses up in the absent

Miss Burke's best black silk,—Miss Burke is the chaperone who- is writing a book on "The Woman of the Future,"—and stealer the paste diamonds from the saint's neck on the staircase, and Biter

on the balcony in the moonlight (conversing with Roger Temple in the neighbouring balcony), in the assumed part of a Spanish'

actress, is one of the liveliest and most living we have read in any novel for a long time. And there is not room,

in the book for the attention to flag, or the interest of the author herself to slacken. Mrs. Edwardes published her' story first, we believe, in a periodical form ; but it reads as if it had been struck off in a week, so little is there of anything like a pause of feeling in the short tale. This, taken with the new' scenery and the new character, furnishes the reason why the tale is so refreshing. Nothing refreshes one like a stirring gallop- through a new country, where you catch the telling features with a glance, and have no time to ponder or analyse. Here, for

instance, is a description of a St. Jean de Luz afternoon, which lES as good as one of Phillips's best pictures, and as likely to linger hr the memory :— " She hesitates, relents, and a minute later they have quitted the' Place, and are making their way down the principal street of the town. towards the macaroon shop. St. Jean de Luz is taking its wonted afternoon siesta at this hour. The balconies are deserted ; the very. churches, filled morning and evening to overflowing with fans, prayer- books, and flirtations, are empty. A bullock-dray or two are to be seen in the market-place, the bullocks in their brown-holland blouses, pa- tiently blinking, with bullock philosophy, at existence, the drivers asleep within the wine shops. A team of close-shorn Spanish mules stand, viciously whisking at the flies with their rat tails, in the shade ; the muleteer, his face prone to mother earth, reposes beside them. Other living forms are there none, save an occasional half-broiled Murray-guided Briton, and five or six ghostly cur dogs,—the cur dogs in St. Jean de Luz never sleep. It being low water, the river mouth and harbour are sending forth liberal smells of all the sun-burnt south: The distant mountain-sides are absolutely painful to the eye in their shadeless ochre-yellow. Heat, as of a very rain of fire, quivering,. piercing, intolerable, is everywhere."

No doubt the cruel attacks on poor Mr. Augustus Jones, founded- on those, crueller still, of the mosquitoes on his forehead, are not

quite fair. A man who did not drop his h's, and who did pronounce French properly, would be quite as liable to be attacked by mosquitoes ; and we have our suspicion that Captain Temple. was mosquito-bitten too. Mosquitoes have no preference for vul- garity of demeanour, or for men who have villas at Clapham. But you must allow something of adventitious help to so rapid and Ito.

lively a writer as Mrs. Edwardes, and as mosquitoes, like human.

preferences, are, we suppose, capricious, we must not refuse a. novelist who is not, on the whole, capricious, the incidental advantage of such an assumption as their caprice. The following.

passage from a scene to which we have already referred will give, some notion of Mrs. Edwardes's lively personal descriptions :—

" On the landing of the second floor stands, as we know, the life- sized figure of a saint ; martyred, satin-slippered, glittering with gor- geous paste adornments. If the good old Beata would only lend that necklace of hers for half an hour, ten minutes, long enough to yield one some faint foretaste of the sweets of brilliants ! If—assuming her por- mission—one were to borrow it, say ! The glass-case can be opened by a cunning hand from the back : this fact, Belinda discovered when the first-floor lodger presented the saint with a new laced handkerchief at Easter. And no living soul is about; and it could not, surely, be much of a sin, considering that the saint is but a big wax doll with bead

eyes and indeed if it were sin, is it not all-important, Mr. Jones and his suit impending, for Belinda to ascertain practically, whether diamonds are becoming to the complexion, and so worth the sacrifice of a life or not ? She creeps down the echoing stone stairs; her heart beating, her unaccustomed feet entangling themselves at every moment in her trailing skirt ; she reaches the landing of the second floor. There stands the Beata, her livid hands crossed on her breast, her bead eyes awfully wide open. There are the paste brilliants. A struggling moonbeam rests on them ; they glitter with deathly, horrible fascination. Belinda's heart and courage wax chill. Suppose the out- should come some night, and, standing beside her bed, lay

• an icy retiti dtive hand upon her face ! To meddle with these holy persons' beads, for aught she knows, may be the most mortal of crimes, and— 'Crime, or no crime, I will do it !' decides the girl, with the spasmodic coward's courage of her sex. Now, may fortune be her friend ! May no inmate of the house pass from floor to floor while the sacrile- gious act is being carried into effect ! The cranky fastening of the glass door gives a groan as she opens it, causing Belinda's guilty con- science to quake again ; but no ear save her own hears the sound. She unclasps the necklace, shivering as her fingers come in contact with the clammy wax throat, then bears away her booty, her legs trembling under her at every step, upstairs. She takes it to the light of her soli- tary candle; admires its mock effulgence ; clasps it, trembling, round her little warm soft neck ; surveys herself on tip-toe in the tarnished mirror above the chimney-piece. And where is conscience, now, where remorse ? Admirable monitors of men, the moment possession has brought satiety, why is it that Conscience and Remorse hold their peace as long as the taste of the apple continues sweet between our teeth ! She surveys herself, well nigh awe-stricken by her own fairness. She feels that to ho the possessor of real diamonds she would cheerfully become Mrs. Augustus Jones and start for Clapham to-morrow. Now, nothing is wanting but a fan and lovers. The fan can be had ; a huge gilt and black structure, of the date of thirty years ago, which lies, for ornament, on the mantelshelf ; and of this Belinda possesses herself. But the lovers ? Bah ! some unimportant details are sure to be want- ing at every rehearsal ! When the prologue is over, the play played out in earnest, the lovers, it may be supposed, will come of themselves. She struts up and down the room, her train outstretched, her fan in motion, her eyes glancing complacently at the mignon little figure the glass gives her duskily back. 'If Captain Temple could see me—if Captain Temple could see me now !' thinks vanity. • If he knew I could be any- thing but ragged, and hideous, and a gamin.'—' And if he did know this, what would Captain Temple care ?' says another sterner voice than that of vanity. 'Of what account is the whole world to him by the side of Rose and Rose's beauty ?'—A sudden leaden weight sinks dead on Belinda's heart. She is nothing to Roger Temple ; holds no more place in his present than in his future. She seems to stifle. The saint's paste diamonds must, surely, be too heavy, so painful is the choking feeling in her throat. Turning abruptly away from the sight of finery and of herself, she extinguishes the candle ; then goes out, bare- armed, bare-necked, in her diamond necklace and train, upon the balcony."

As we are not going to tell the story of A Vagabond Heroine, we will leave our readers with these tempting specimens of Mrs. Edwardes's lively and fascinating style. There is much liveliness which has no warmth beneath the liveliness ; but that is not the case here. The "Vagabond Heroine" is drawn with a genuine tenderness, and no one with a heart can help sympathising with her not very well regulated love. There is nothing mannish about the buoyancy and dash of this fascinating tale. Mrs. Edwardes hates conven- tionality, but she does not identify strong feeling with lawless life. The story is full of colour, but it is full of that sympathy with true disinterestedness and of that contempt for unreality of all kinds, which are the best guarantees for true morality; and as far as regards the "Vagabond Heroine" at all events, we can safely assure our readers that it does not make vagabondism heroic, though it does make conventionality silly. There is the flavour of something like true genius about A Vagabond Heroine.