terrorises her with his unwelcome attentions, would have met
a violent death, or himself have murdered someone, in his own country or
elsewhere as inevitably as in Australia; and the man who killed him
would not have found Katherine Knowles less faithful during the long
years of his imprisonment had her sacrifice been under the daily
observation of Hammond's family and her own strait-laced aunts in their
East Norfolk home.

In _A Marriage Ceremony_, the only advantage secured by taking the story
from London to Melbourne--instead of to New York, let us say--seems to
lie in whatever added strength the sense of greater distance imparts to
the temporary appearance of a final separation between Betty Ochiltree
and her strangely-wedded husband. The marriage that was a condition of
their inheritance having been performed, bride and bridegroom part in
accordance with a previous agreement. The former reappears as a
prominent figure in the society of modern Melbourne--the Melbourne of
1893, when the failure of banks and land companies was a regular subject
of morning news.

Here, it might be supposed, was an opportunity for one or two vivid and
instructive sketches of the sensational period that witnessed the proof
of so much folly and its punishment, and wrought so many more effects on
all classes of Australian society than could be noted in the common
records of the time. But the great crisis is almost ignored in the
novel. There are merely a few passing references to its progress, and a
mention of the loss on the part of Mrs. Ochiltree of some of the wealth
which she is beginning to regard as having been rather spuriously
acquired.

Even the very successful story of the _Three Miss Kings_ and _A Mere
Chance_ tell little of the city life of Australia, though their action
is placed in it almost exclusively. The latter is a tale of match-making
intrigue and money-worship in Toorak, but the main interest of the plot
apart, the account of fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colourless
one. As for Mrs. Duff-Scott and her Major, the amiable pair who in the
character of leaders of Melbourne society undertake to find husbands for
Elizabeth King and her sisters, and whose benevolent intentions are so
effectually forestalled, they are as conventionally English as though
they belonged to the pages of Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.

Again, though during half of _Fidelis_ we are given occasional
impressive and delightful glimpses o