If I were to give away the plot of Miss MARY L. PENDERED'S _The Secret Sympathy_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) I think that you would sniff. It is not likely to cause animated discussion in intellectual circles. We are introduced to a girl who, finding herself reduced from affluence to poverty, takes a garage and runs it with success, and we become acquainted with a chauffeur and a peer, and the former turns out to be--but that is just what I am not going to tell you. If you want a book in which the hero is a very perfect gentleman indeed and the villain really is a villain, then here you are. Miss PENDERED'S scheme is not too subtle, but what she has set out to do she has done, and done well. Although her characters play their part in the War, she resists the temptation to smother them with V.C.'s and other decorations, and for this abstinence and for _Miss Chetwynd_, a middle-aged spinster of shrewd sense and humour, I warmly commend her. I confess myself in love with _Miss Chetwynd_ and should dearly like to hear her candid opinion of _The Secret Sympathy_. But I feel sure that, if she smiled a little at the wonderfulness of it all, her final verdict would be as benevolent as mine. * * * * * Mr. RICHARD MAHER'S _The Shepherd of the North_ (MACMILLAN) looks a little like one of those rather elaborate Catholic tracts in form of a novel of which we have so many classic examples. _Mgr. Winthrop_, the Bishop of Alden, way up in the Adirondacks, was indeed a noble old fellow, somewhat given to long speeches, but with a great heart in the right place, and wise and tolerant withal. He was known and loved by the small farmers and lumber-men as _The White Horse Chaplain_ for a deed of valour done in his youth in the Civil War. And he carried that high quality of courage into his work of defending his people against the machinations of the U. & M. Railroad, which swept down upon them and stuck at nothing, not arson on a Teuton scale or judicial murder, to get the prize it was after--valuable iron ore in the hills through which its track ran. However, it was the Bishop's oar, dexterously thrust in, which finally won the victory. There is a point which puzzles me considerably. The crisis of the story turns on the secret of the Confessional. A young man is accused of murder, and the Bishop, his friend, has heard the confession of the real murderer, so that his lips are sealed. But his fiancée also unwittingly overheard the essential of the confession screamed by the dying man. Mr. MAHER seems to think her bound by the same sacred ties as the Bishop, even to the point of allowing her lover to go to the chair because of her silence. But is that sound moral theology? I should doubt it. I ought to add that there's nothing to shock the most sensitive evangelical conscience, and quite a good deal to edify, instruct and entertain. * * * * * Overheard at a fashionable restaurant:--