TIIE PAINTED FACE. By Oliver Onions. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)—Mr. Oliver
Onions is a novelist whose insight, delicacy, and style are perhaps not sufficiently appreciated. He is especially an adept in the psychology of spiritual fear, and the desperate courage that at all costs rises to expel it. The idea of ` the passion of the past," burning down the years to claini its dues of dread and splendour from the present, has been his theme more than once. In The Painted Face, a beautiful unawakened girl, whose patron saint is Rosalie, is drawn back to the ancient gods whose victim she has been from the beginning. The contrast between the tourists' Tunis and the archaic traditions of the hills behind is firmly held .; and it is a perilous series of scenes that ends in the tragic, ghostly ruse of the Painted Face. The book contains two more stories. In The kosewood Door, the dangerous past returns again with a sword, to be received with a bright and consenting fatalism by a gallant lady. In Master of the House dwells a shudder roused by the notion of lycanthropy and a glimpse of Eastern magic. Here are three " joys of fear.," perSuasively presented in a flexible and kindling manner.
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