If I were to be asked in which of Mr. Conrad's writings his genius shows itself at its highest power, I should answer, without hesitation, in this the latest of them. If next I were asked whether it is the one of his books with which the reader, as he closes it, will feel most contented, the answer might hardly be the same. Certainly Mr. Conrad has never introduced us to a group of characters more striking or more vividly and variously alive, nor worked up their relations to a climax so doubly thrilling at once in the elements of external action and suspense and those of inward emotional complexity and conflict. And certainly neither he nor any living writer has achieved a finer, more illuminating study of the eternal feminine than is that of the central figure of the group, the woman wearing in her hair that ornament of a golden arrow which is made to live in the reader's memory as the mysterious, ever-haunting symbol of her charm,

But why, if such praise as this is really due to The Arrow of Gold, why, the reader will naturally ask, must it be tempered by the admission that he may find himself closing the volume with some sense of disappointment or incomplete satisfaction? The reason, as I should put it, lies in the circumstance, which discloses itself almost without disguise, that the story is not one of free and independent artistic creation, but to some extent at least of autobiographical fact and reminiscence. Readers who remember the "Tremolino' incident in that avowed

volume of real experiences, The Mirror of the Sea, will recognize as old acquaintances several of the actors in the present story, especially the exConfederate and present Carlist soldier of fortune, Captain Blunt, and Dominic, the stanch and daring seaman, smuggler, and blockade runner. Hence it is borne in upon us that not the uncontrolled choice of the artist, but the fatalities of life itself, have dictated the close of the story and the issue of that episode of youthful passion which it so enthrallingly sets forth; and if such close and such issue leave some readers feeling balked in their imaginative desires and sympathies, it is against life rather than against the artist that they must murmur.

The characters of the story are a cosmopolitan group of persons whom interest or principle or sentiment or love of adventure, or a combination of them all, have involved in the abor tive Carlist attempts upon the throne of Spain in the early 'seventies of the last century. Foremost among them are 'Monsieur George,' a gallant young gentleman and follower of the sea, who in his old age tells these adventures of his youth for the information of a friend; and Doña Rita, otherwise Madame de Lastaola, a lady by whose beaux veux, above all things, he has been enlisted in the cause. Hers is the central figure about whom the whole action turns. By origin a Basque peasant girl, she has spent her childhood herding goats among her native mountains, been taken thence into the care of an aunt who is concierge in

a Paris studio, and by the time we meet her has been transformed and educated by several years' experience as the treasured indispensable life model, the chosen companion and consenting although loveless mistress, of a celebrated Parisian personage, Henri Allègre, painter by profession, millionaire by inheritance, connoisseur, and art collector by predilection, by temperament and character cynic and scorner of his fellow men. Exclusively through her appearances as the regular and mysteriously fascinating companion of Allègre on his morning rides in the Bois de Boulogne, she has become known to certain distinguished elements in the male social world of Paris. Her protector by the time we meet her has died, leaving her the whole of his great fortune and famous collections, as well as all his houses, including two at Marseilles, where the whole drama is presently enacted. Her wealth, her anomalous social position, the spell of her irregular, irresistible physical beauty and charm, and her acquaintance with leading personages in Parisian society and politics, have given her special influence behind the scenes as well as made her the butt of endless gossip. She has been seen at Venice in the company of the Pretender, Don Carlos, and is supposed to have been his mistress, but, in fact, has refused the honor, finding nothing in him fit to inspire a passion. Whether scornfully by way of amends to him, or from a sentiment for the romance of Legitimism, or from what motives we do not clearly see, she has made herself an active and very serviceable agent in his cause. And the story of the present book is the story of her relations with some of her recruits, and first and foremost with the young sea officer, gun-runner, and smuggler of stores and munitions, Monsieur George, who until he met her had

had the sea for his sole passion and mistress.

The method of the narrative is different from that by which Mr. Conrad often chooses, having plunged with his opening chapters into the very heart of his story, to hold us up while he harks back and tells us at full length the antecedents and circumstances which have led his characters to the point at which he first introduced us to them. In this case the narrator—that is, Monsieur George himself in his old age begins by relating a series of conversations held in a café at Marseilles which prepare us quietly for the events to follow. The other interlocutors are a simple-hearted English gentleman, one Mills, and Blunt, the above-mentioned American from South Carolina, the former a bookish sympathizer with the Legitimist cause, the latter an active officer in the Carlist army. I confess to being among those whom no historical events in my lifetime have left colder than the various Carlist risings and intrigues in Spain, and for a while I feared that I was not going to be interested by the talk of these three partisans, the big genial Englishman, the exquisitely-mannered ex-Confederate officer with his perpetually gleaming smile, and the ardent young man of the sea. But let no one think he has really read this book until he has read it twice, or it may be thrice, for the thrill and tension of the later developments throw back with each reading a stronger reflected light on these introductory conversations and bring out more clearly their artistic point and purposefulness.

From the moment the heroine herself comes upon the scene all the other persons and everything in the book take on a new vitality. Her first appearance coming down the stairs in the villa at Marseilles may remind the reader of another dazzling first ap

parition of a heroine on the staircase, namely, that of Beatrix Esmond though rather by contrast than by comparison, for no two women could be more unlike whether in beauty or disposition or in the atmosphere that emanates from and surrounds them. As to the other characters, whether remembered from actual life or not, they one and all come before us endowed with that higher vitality which nothing but re-creation in the mind of a great imaginative artist can bestow. Alike the soldier of fortune from South Garolina, with his aristocratic principles and traditions causing him to rebel against the idea of repairing his fortunes by marriage with the enriched but socially soiled daughter of the people, while at the same time he feels her fascination strong upon him and is acutely jealous of any possible rival: his mother, an equally polished, exquisitely clothed and mannered type of impoverished and exiled American from the Southern States, who, knowing her son's scruples, is coldly and subtly determined that they shall yield, and that the heiress shall be the restorer of his ruined fortunes and of her own; Doña Rita's still peasant elder sister, Thérèse, abominable with her deadly combination of devout sanctimonious righteousness and rapacious worldly greed at her sinning sister's expense: Ortega, once a boy against whose lustful persecution the goatherd girl had had to defend herself with mockery and stone-throwing, and whose passion, now that he is a still more lustful grown-up clerk with overred lips and silky black whiskers, is the one thing she fears in life: all these, with Dominic, the loyal smuggler seaman, and Dominic's mistress, the handsome innkeeper, and Rose, Doña Rita's devoted servant, and a dozen others, down even to the damaged lay figure which has found its way from

the Paris studio to the Marseilles villa, affect us with an amazing sense of vitality, but do not the least interfere with the domination of the central theme.

That is the passion which springs up and reaches its climax from one carnival season to another between Doña Rita and the youth whom she has enlisted as blockade-runner and smugglerin-chief. The phases of this passion are made to develop themselves in a manner (after all that has been written. in the world about love) at almost every point original and unexpected, yet none the less illuminating and convincing. From their first encounter we watch growing an instinctive bond between what is spiritually unstained in the quondam mistress of the cynic millionaire artist and the honest and ardent inexperience of the freshhearted sailor-youth. During all their subsequent meetings, in the intervals of his gun-running expeditions, or when the last of them has ended in shipwreck and disaster, the play of emotion between them holds our interest spellbound. When she feels for the first time in life the dawning of true passion within her, she is frightened both for her own sake and his, and once and again must check herself and chill him off in a manner which he in his young simplicity takes for caprice and falsity. They bicker and quarrel and are resentful against each other and make it up, she most of the time exercising a sweetly forbearing, gently mocking long-sufferance under his ever-renewed misunderstandings and reproaches (are these not perhaps at certain points too obstinately persistent and perverse?). During these scenes of softening and hardening, reluctance and revulsion and hesitation and all but abandonment, this or that wordless gesture, imagined and told with inevitable rightness, serves to

keep us aware, yet with never a touch of crudity or coarseness, of the movements not only of her heart but of her blood. Woman to the core as she is, we are made to feel at every moment, behind the freshness and sanity and fullness of her individual being, something mysterious and elusive, not individual but immemorial and belonging to bygone ages and to the women of all time.

At length, through the combined agencies of the detestable Thérèse and the frantic Ortega and the jealous Blunt, the two are locked within one chamber and have to defend themselves through a night of thrilling suspense and of danger none the less deadly for having in it elements of the ridiculous. At the end no strength to fight against her love is left in her, and they come together, to retreat for a few idyllic months beyond the ken of friends and enemies, gossips and intriguers, the faithful and the false alike. But the idyll is destined to be only an interlude in their two lives. A duel with the baffled Blunt, who could hesitate and hesitate but cannot endure being supplanted, brings it to an end. During a long half-conscious period, the wounded lover is vaguely aware of the comings and goings of his beloved, and finally comes to himself The Telegraph

to learn from the faithful Mills that she has left him and totally disappeared. We must surmise that in her own honesty of heart and consciousness of soilure she holds herself no fit mate for his life. At any rate disappear she does so soon as his recovery is certain; all that he ever hears even remotely concerning her is the sale of the great Allègne collections and he has to go back and console himself with his other and yet more imperious and mysterious love, the sea. This is the issue which some readers long should have been different, such as an artist working in freedom might have made it and not as life determined it. And again there are others who may wish that the events followsing the critical night had not, even were their issue inevitable, been quite so hurriedly and slightly told, and that a final veil had not been drawn so suddenly alike upon the heroine herself and upon the Blunts, mother and son, and the infamous Thérèse and the insane Ortega, and all the other characters who have become so acutely real to us in the reading. But all intelligent readers alike must agree in any case or so at least it seems to me thanking the master for a study of a woman's heart and mystery scarcely to be surpassed in literature.

in

WHERE had it come from? I, John Beveledge Humdrum, general practitioner, of 105A Hammersmith Road, Kensington, had come down to breakfast on that eventful July morning expecting nothing more exciting than the eggs and bacon with which my excellent man Perkins has regularly provided me on similar occasions for the past eleven years.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, on throwing open the door of the book case that contained my sparse collection of medical works, in order to consult Abernethy on Biscuits, to be confronted by the doubled-up corpse of a young man of distinguished appearance, wearing a suit of evening clothes of the most expensive cut.

My thoughts flew back to the events. of the previous evening in an attempt to unravel the mystery. Had anything remarkable happened? And then I remembered an incident, trivial enough in itself, which might supply a clue. At about eight o'clock I had received a professional summons, notable as being the first in my career. A heavily-veiled woman wearing a complete set of massive ermines had descended from a a magnificently-appointed motor-car before my door. In response to her impassioned appeal, delivered with a marked Castilian accent, I had accompanied her to a miserable tenement dwelling in a sordid Limehouse slum. Here, after I had reluctantly given a pledge of secrecy, I was taken to the bedside of my patient, a fair-haired boy of three or four.

A villainous-looking Chinaman, who was in attendance, gave me to understand, partly by signs and partly in pidgin-English, that the child had swallowed a bone button. Being unacquainted with the exact treatment of such a case I recommended his removal to the nearest hospital. As there was nothing more to detain me I left at once, overwhe'med by the passionate gratitude of my mysterious caller; but as I glanced back at the corner of the disreputable street I saw a face charged with diabolical hatred watching me from the grimy window of the room I had just quitted. It was the visage of the aged Chinaman, who, but a moment before, had been bowing to me with true Oriental deference.

I was on the point of ringing for Perkins, in order to question him, when something caused me to hesitate.

It was well that I did so. The next moment the double doors of the French window that overlooked the bustling turmoil of Kensington's busiest thoroughfare were flung frantically open and there sprang into the room a young girl whose dazzling beauty was, if possible, heightened by the breathless excitement under which she was laboring.

'Dr. Humdrum!' she exclaimed, throwing aside the luxuriant crimson opera cloak that had hitherto concealed the supple perfection of her lithe form. 'Save me! Help me!' and a look of baffling terror swept across her mobile features.

'Certainly,' I stammered, be