believe, that it was _Damia_ and
not herself who had remained at home you recognise a very pretty gambit of
intrigue. Unfortunately, as I said above, the tension is not quite
sustained, partly because the characters all behave in an increasingly
foolish and improbable fashion (even for tales of this genre); partly
because there is never sufficient uncertainty as to who it was (not, of
course, _Damia_) who really killed _Verinder_. Still, of its kind, as the
sort of shocker that used to be valued at a shilling, but appears, like
everything else, to have risen in price, _The Lady in the Black Mask_ is
fairly up to the average. I fancy her profits might have been greater
before the discouragement of railway travelling. That is precisely the
environment for which she is best fitted.

* * * * *

In the series of "Chap" books which is emerging from The Bodley Head I have
no doubt that _Canada Chaps_ will be welcome. I hope, however, that Mrs.
SIME will not mind my saying that the best of her tales are those which
have more to do with Canada than its "chaps." Her stories of fighting and
of fighters seem to me to have a note in them that does not ring quite
true. It is just the difference between the soldier telling his own artless
and rugged tale and someone else telling it for him with a touch of
artifice. But when the author merely uses the War as her background she
writes with real power. The straining for effect vanishes, and so little do
the later stories resemble the earlier that I should not have guessed that
they were written by the same hand. "Citoyenne Michelle" and "The King's
Gift," for instance, are true gems, and they are offered to you at the
price of paste. Nowhere will you find a better bargain for your shilling.

* * * * *

HELEN MACKAY, in _A Journal of Small Things_ (MELROSE), sets before us
with, it might seem, almost too deliberate simplicity of idiom little
scenes and remembered reflections of her days in France since the July of
the terrible year. An American to whom France has come to be her adopted
and most tenderly loved foster-country, she tells of little things, chiefly
sad little things, seen in the hospitals she served or by the wayside or in
the houses of the simple and the great, shadowed alike by the all-embracing
desolation of the War. The writer has a singular power of selecting the
significant details of an incident, and a del