* * * * * Anybody can understand how extremely annoying and inconvenient the complete disappearance of a husband would be to a wife after a mere fortnight or so of married existence, before he had even begun to complain of the--well, anyhow that is what happens in Mrs. BELLOC LOWNDES'S latest novel, _The End of Her Honeymoon_ (METHUEN). The _Dampiers_ arrive in Paris, a Paris _en fete_ and crowded beyond all custom because of the state visit of the TSAR, and are obliged to occupy rooms on different floors of the _Poulains'_ hotel. Next morning _Mrs. Dampier_ awakes to find herself in the awkward predicament of Ariadne on the beach of Naxos, with the aggravation (spared to Theseus' bride) that the hotel people absolutely deny that she came with a husband at all. A punctilious if sceptical American senator (refreshingly guiltless of accent) and his enthusiastic son and daughter take pity on her, and the rest of the book resolves itself into a detective story, saved from conventionality by the pleasantly distinguished style in which the author writes and the intimate knowledge which she appears to possess of the Paris _prefecture de police._ _Gerald Burton,_ the young American, not entirely platonic in his solicitude, is baffled; _Salgas_, a famous enquiry agent, is baffled; and I am ready to take very long odds against the reader's unravelling the mystery, unless he happens to be familiar with a certain legend of the plague (though no plague comes in here). Indeed, it is only a chance conversation in the last chapter that throws light, my dear Watson, on this particularly _bizarre_ affair. And what then, you ask, had happened to _Jack Dampier_ after all? Ah! * * * * *