When No Man Pursueth. By Mrs. Belloe Lowndes. (W. Heine-
mann. 6s.)—It is to be hoped that although Mrs. Belloc Lowndes gives her new novel the sub-title "An Everyday Story," the incidents therein related do not often happen in English country life. Her book is concerned with a group of people living in Surrey in a set of houses built on peculiar lines by one owner. Those houses are all small, all picturesque, and all connected with each other by telephone. But " Sunniland," as the settlement is called, is not a village, for it possesses no shops, no public-house, and no police. Into this community come three strangers, who give themselves out to be husband, wife, and sister-in-law, and before he has made much progress with the story the reader will share the suspicions of George Glyn, the young doctor, that the soi-disant brother and sister are slowly poisoning the wife. The interest of the plot lies in the struggle which goes on in the young doctor's mind as to what he is to do. He is leaving the village for his honeymoon, and his locum tenens by no means agrees with him in his diagnosis of the case. The picture of George Glyn, and his hesitations and perplexities, is well done, and the reader will feel some relief when, at the end, the problem is taken out of his hands and the villains of the piece are discovered in their full iniquity. Whether Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's picture of Cynthia Burdmore is true to life may be doubted, but in the portrait of the wife, "poor Louisa," she contrives very skilfully to mingle comedy and pathos. The book is well written, and the minor characters clearly drawn. The interview between Glyn and the fashionable London doctor, and the latter's change of front when he discovers that the locum tenens concerned is his own son, are cleverly managed.
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