A Home in Inveresk. By T. L. Paton. (Methuen.)—This is
a rather slight story, and, although the scene of it is laid in Scot- Land, the characteristics of what has come to be known as the Scottish school of fiction are conspicuous by their absence. So far as plot goes, at all events, the story might quite as well have been placed in Devonshire as where it is. A very good girl, Marion Graham by name, marries the impressionable Nigel Fal- coner after some "very nice talks" about Carlyle and Spencer, Darwin and Huxley, to find that he is already the father of an illegitimate child. Her sense of privity is terribly shocked, and
she indicates this horror in so unmistakable a fashion that Nigel, in remorse and abject self-reproach, leaves her and flees first to London and then to America. Ultimately, however, she persuades herself to forgive her husband, and goes to America to find him, and ultimately succeeds, though only to cherish fresh suspicions, which in this case are groundless. It must be admitted that the story is rather a poor one. The love-making, too, of Nigel's dubious friend Hornby to that friend's wife is rather tepid. Some of the characters, however, are fairly well drawn and indubitably Scotch—more especially the rustic philosopher McTaggart, and the grasping, hypocritical farmer Duncan.
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