she ought at least to let us know that she means it. _Gabrielle Brenda_
is presented to us by ALICE BIRKHEAD as a girl brought up in the remoter
parts of Cornwall by a father who was a semi-retired doctor and
something of a dreamer. She develops dramatic talent, and having become
engaged to her instructor gives him up to her younger sister for no
better reason apparently than that she has always been accustomed to
give that sister everything she wants. Afterwards _Gabrielle_ becomes
the secretary of a domineering little manufacturer in the Black Country
with expensive sons and daughters. She resists his proposals of marriage
and also the temptation to purloin his eldest daughter's _fiance_, and
then reverts to her original vocation, without finding on the stage
either satisfaction or any remarkable success. For I see no indication
that the offer of a fairly lucrative engagement in America, with which
the book ends, is regarded by the author as the golden moment of her
heroine's career. Altogether I am at a loss whether to learn from
_Shifting Sands_ the disadvantages of a haphazard education, the unfair
position of woman in the labour-market, or merely the irony of fate. And
this is a pity because, though the manner of the story is very episodic,
there are scenes and conversations of considerable vivacity and truth.

* * *

BARONESS ORCZY is to be congratulated on a distinctly ingenious idea.
Searching about her, no doubt, for a successor to the famous
_Pimpernel_, her attention was caught by a certain picture in the
WALLACE Collection, a picture everyone knows and admires for its
rollicking and adventurous high spirits. "Capital!" said she (as I
imagine it); "why not trace back the line of _Blakeney_, and make the
subject of this picture the ancestor from whom he inherited his
endearing qualities?" _The Laughing Cavalier_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is
the result. Having thus divined the origin of the hero, I feel that any
further indication of his character would be almost superfluous. You
will certainly not find this new _Blakeney_ unworthy of his house. It is
perhaps something of a surprise to find him a mercenary in
seventeenth-century Holland; but the old touch is there. Thus, having
been hired by a gang of conspirators to abduct the sister of one of
them, who has overheard their plans for the slaying of the Stadtholder,
and keep her prisoner till the deed be done, what more _Blakeneyish_
than that he should