s dead under their roof. It is a somewhat
painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford,
but it has the quality of intense actuality.

In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion
to the heroine of _Fidelis_ by being shown in successive attachments to
other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises
that, 'the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the
laws of Nature,' Adam is certain to suffer in the reader's good opinion
for having 'continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his
daily dinner.' No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears
that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily
source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped
marriage--first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with
the daughter of his landlady--and that at another period of his colonial
life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is
not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates;
at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have
been.

It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that
makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge's best novels. In each,
whatever the quality of the plot, there are always two or three
personages who talk and act as real men and women do--now rationally or
in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which,
as the author once describes it, 'is like a natural law, independent of
other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.'
They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women
is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.

Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an
intelligent, eager face, though 'her mouth was large, her nose not all
it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and
veils.' She was 'not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.'

Sarah French, the girl in _Fidelis_ whose comeliness so nearly drew the
hero from his old allegiance, has 'a strong and good, rather than a
pretty, face,' with a 'large and substantial figure.' Adam Drewe
concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he
finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful
healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dre