Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her, said: "Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?" "I don't care," he answered gruffly. "It isn't any fun without you." She paused and added: "Would you mind if I stayed here too?" "I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her, determined, as he was, that she should never know it! "I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed with that melancholy stare through her large spectacles, that always irritated Jeremy, out across the garden. "I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I can't get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate the Dean's Ernest?" A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy grew older he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to bear the weight of this exhaustive description. Mr. Brett Young's less unusual design gives him better opportunities for the use of his talent, but not often the opportunities his talent deserves. He came into notice a little later than that younger generation which we have mentioned, and in some ways his gifts are superior to those of any novelist of his own age. But it is a matter for doubt whether they are strictly the gifts of a novelist. In the row of his books, all sincere, all well written, all with obvious merits, the best is undeniably his account of the East African Campaign, _Marching on Tanga_, the second his collection of poems, _Five Degrees South_. In these two, landscape and his delight in it had an uncontested supremacy. In his novels up to now that supremacy has been contested by the characters, who have, however, faded away in the end against the background like puffs of smoke. This certainly allowed the author's best talent to be displayed at advantage, and yet it is a doubtful recommendation of a novel to say that the persons in it can hardly be noticed.