The narrative hastens on, always with a hovering sense of doom. The innocent, tender love stories of the sisters develop. They are but seventeen and nineteen, but they are women. It is impossible to do justice to the telling of this story, so we will pass to the main event, the invitation of the London aunt, the failing health and fortune of the mother, which nerves her to accept an offer that will separate her from her children, and the almost happy bustle of preparation for the first visit from home, and for that wonder of wonders—a London season! The sinister part played by Madame Aurore, the little London dressmaker who, while working for them in their country home lays the plans that are to decoy them to their ruin in London, is worked out with sure, rapid touch. Then comes the arrival in London, the meeting of the girls by the pseudo “aunt,” who has been dressed for the part by the aid of a photograph sent on to the procurers by Madame Aurore. Then follows the terrible scene in the house with the barred windows and the strange overwhelming scent, the escape of the Elder Sister, the heart-breaking search for the younger—the madness, the despair! One of the most pathetic things in the book is the heart-broken young lover who traces Bettina from London to “their house in Paris”—thence from one place to another “always too late.” The merciful death of the mother, and the fixed conviction, the subliminal inspiration, that comes toward the end to the tortured brain of the elder sister that Bettina has found her release in death, alleviate and spiritualize the misery of it all. Now as to the truth of this tremendous story. I suppose that having put the very soul of truth and reality into the narrative itself, having written it from the very depths of her own pitying heart, the author has not reckoned with the callous incredulity which the book often meets, or she might well have added an introductory note in regard to the actual facts in this case from real life. The story, she told me subsequent to its publication, was absolutely true, but much softened at many points. In the true story, for instance, the mother is not dead, but is in a state of dementia on the continent, whither the family have moved, being unable to endure England and its memories.