One of the few writers of fiction who seems to me to possess an ear for the music of events is Miss Margaret Veley. Her first novel, "For Percival," although diffuse, although it occasionally flowed into by-channels and lingered in stagnating pools, was informed and held together, even at ends the most twisted and broken, by that sense of rhythmic progression which is so dear to me, and which was afterwards so splendidly developed in "Damocles." Pale, painted with grey and opaline tints of morning passes the grand figure of Rachel Conway, a victim chosen for her beauty, and crowned with flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of the maniac, and it comes back to her in its awful lines and lights when she finds herself rich and loved by the man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a double one. Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is to trample out her love. Unborn generations cry to her. The wrath and the lamentation of the chorus of the Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin, the pathetic responses of voices far in the depths of ante-natal night, these the modern novelist, playing on an inferior instrument, may suggest, but cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots. There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Rachel Conway puts her dreams away, she will henceforth walk in a sad and shady path; her interests are centred in the child of the man she loves, and as she looks for a last time on the cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the sunset that encircles her home, her sorrow swells once again to passion, and, we know, for the last time.