That clever lady, ELINOR MORDAUNT, has collected into the volume that she calls Before Midnight (CASSELL) a series of short stories of a psychic (though not always ghostly) character, which, while not very eerie, or on the same high level, are at their best both original and impressive.  The first of them, which affords excuse for a highly-intriguing cover-picture, is at once the most spooksome and the least satisfactory.  That is to say that, though it opens with a genuine and quite horrible thrill, the “explanation” is obscure and tame.  Far more successful, to my mind, is “The Vision,” a delicate little idyll of a Midland schoolmarm, to whom is shown the death of Adonis and the lamenting of his goddess-lover.  The writing of this touches real beauty (the high-fantastic, instead of the merely high-falutin’, which in such connection would have been so fatally easy).  To sum up, though one at least of these “dreams before midnight” may quite possibly become a nightmare after it, I fancy that, to all lovers of the occult, the game will be found well worth the bed-room candle.

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There are qualities in The Bird of Life, by GERTRUDE VAUGHAN (CHAPMAN AND HALL), which cause me to look forward to this lady’s future work with very considerable interest.  In the present novel she sets out the life story of Rachel up to a point boldly given as being beyond the conclusion of the War, in which, by the way, both her husband and the man whom she ought to have married are killed on the same day.  The first eighty-four pages of the book raised my hopes very high.  They describe with great simplicity and sympathy the thoughts and feelings, the romances and difficulties, of an affectionate and lonely little girl living with her Uncle Matthew and her Aunt Elizabeth, and loving them both with a childlike fervour.  There is no exaggeration; the writing goes true to its mark, and the effect designed by the writer is admirably well made.  Then Uncle Matthew dies and Rachel finds a new home in the Vicarage of Mr. Venning, a family man if ever there was one, for he has fifteen children.  From this point the interest is slightly diluted, and the excellence of the book diminishes.  One does not recognise in the more mature Rachel the girl one had expected to find after one’s initiation into the secrets of her baby mind.  She marries Edward Venning, and finds too late that he is, like his father, made up of convention and narrowness.  She plans a disappearance, and leaves some of her belongings on the edge of a bottomless tarn.  Then, being hypothetically dead, she begins to live her life in her own way.  Later on she returns to Edward, “on approval for six months”; but this period was apparently not sufficient to break the chain that bound her to Another, and, the War intervening, she is left almost doubly widowed.  I feel that I have not quite done justice to Miss VAUGHAN’S book, but, on the other hand, I am sure that she has not quite done justice to her unquestionable talent.