Ashe is, as the best type of English gentleman and statesman, capitally done. Mary Lyster would have been as perfect a portrait of the same class of social product but for the author’s inartistic slip in degrading her unexpectedly to the rôle of stage villain, the jarring note in this clever story. Logically, Mary would have been William’s wife but for Kitty’s appeal to the latter at a time when his sympathies were most vulnerable. Their marriage is, from the first, an incongruous one; Ashe’s indulgence and blindness throw Kitty’s absurdities into increasingly conspicuous relief, and his absorption in political exigencies is broken only at intervals by some startling misdemeanor on her part, resulting in scenes of passionate and half-remorseful affection. Cliffe’s strange influence upon Kitty forms a powerful developing force upon her destiny. Her occasional revolt against it is quite in keeping with the strength which now and then manifests itself in her untrained and abnormal make-up. The character of Lady Caroline is followed in main events; seldom overdrawn, though in the capacity of hostess she is now and then allowed to lapse into a lower grade of social standards than one would expect, and her heartlessness toward her child seems inconsistent with certain other outbreaks of maternal passion. The gentle, worldly-wise little Dean must not be passed over. Perhaps the strongest point in the whole story is laid in the closing scene, where he brings home to Ashe the latter’s terrible responsibility for his wife’s degradation because of the poverty of a love which has taken no account of the soul and its claims in his policy of blindness and indulgence. Poor Lady Kitty discovers that same soul, too late for the discovery to be of much use either to herself or her husband, but one is rather relieved to leave them reconciled, even with the interruption of Lady Kitty’s demise, and to wish William a more serene period of existence. For Mrs. Ward’s heroes and heroines are very real people, moving in familiar paths, and the charm of her stories is that one forgets the fictitious in a thoroughly absorbing interest. * * * * * “A Dark Lantern,” by Elizabeth Robins, Macmillan Company, is another story of English society, and involves a somewhat striking study of character, though that is by no means all there is to the book. Katharine Dereham is a very human and a very charming personality, in spite of the almost incredible inconsistencies which mark her relations with Prince Anton of Breitenlohe-Waldenstein in the beginning, and Garth Vincent at the end. It is not altogether incomprehensible that she should have been both attracted and repelled by the prince, when one considers the innate deceitfulness of his nature, and perhaps, after her experience with him, it is not so strange that she should have turned with relief to Vincent, whose sincerity was indomitable, even if it was habitually brutal.