for weeks and weeks, so that it can appear on
the horizon at the moment of the first embrace. This situation is so
popular at present that it is surprising that there are enough desert
islands to go round.

Again, the lonely bungalow episode is pretty cheerless for the heroine. She
accepts an apparently harmless invitation to spend a week-end with friends
in the country. When she arrives at the station there is no one to meet
her. After a course of desert islands this ought to arouse her suspicions,
but she never seems to benefit by experience. At the bungalow, reached in a
hired fly and a blinding snowstorm, she finds the whole household away. The
four other week-end guests, her host and hostess and their five children,
the invalid aunt who resides with the family, the three female servants and
the boot-boy who lives in--all have completely vanished. The only sign of
life for miles is the hero standing on the doorstep looking bewildered and
troubled, as well he might, for he knows that he must spend the night in a
snowstorm to avoid compromising the heroine.

And when the family return next morning and explain that they went out to
look at the sunset, but were held up at a neighbour's by the weather,
nobody seems to think the excuse a little thin.

The heroine can never hope for a tranquil existence like other people. I
read of one only recently who, just because she strongly objected to the
man her parents wanted her to marry, was flung with him on an iceberg that
had only seating capacity for two. And when the iceberg began to melt--
writers must at times manipulate the elements--it meant that she must
either watch the man drown or share the same seat with him. The rescue
party held off, of course, until the harassed girl was sitting on his
knees, and then received the pair as they slid down, announcing their
engagement.

What do I intend to do with Bertram and Eunice? I am undecided whether to
place them in the vicinity of a volcano, which, unknown to Bertram, has
eruptive tendencies, or to send them up in an aeroplane and break the
propeller in mid-Atlantic just as the rescue party (including the
husband)--What? Do I understand anything about aeroplanes? Certainly not;
but I know everything about heroines.

* * * * *

EVIDENCE.

"What's all this I hear about the Abbey?" said my friend Truscott when I
met him yesterday.

Truscott has just returned from New Zealand and is for