d had predicted--a rosy-cheeked
second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his
engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been
made on purpose for him.... No later than Saturday afternoon--and
early at that--Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen
him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife's door, with a spring
in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning
to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her
splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom,
and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart,
which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him;
but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so
glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house
in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up.
The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it
for them any more.

In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the
best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their
brief meetings as girl and youth--she with her weak eyes bandaged, but
reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to
remain with her, but forcing himself away--and then in long years after,
when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming
hopelessly blind.

The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the
whole of Ada Cambridge's work, and has not been equalled in its kind by
any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this
chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author's
style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid
and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same
novel, is conveniently quotable:

It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried
its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines
were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a
little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down
instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the
ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby's touch
would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon