We are glad they discarded the knave.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Country Cousin (who suffers from his wife’s elbow at each crossing).  “Oo! lawks, Maria!  Next time we’ve to cross lemme be roon ower!”]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Double Life (Grant Richards) is a story that unblushingly bases its appeal on the love of almost everyone for a fairy-tale of good fortune.  The matter of it is to show how a lady amateur, wife of a novelist, herself hardly knowing one end of a horse from the other, might make forty thousand pounds in a year on the Turf, without even her own husband so much as suspecting her activities.  The thing isn’t likely, is indeed a fantasy of the wildest improbability; but, told with the zest imparted to it here by Mr. Grant Richards, it provides first-rate fun.  Some danger of monotony there was bound to be in what is really a variation upon a single theme.  Though the author cunningly avoids this, I think it might justly be observed that he has made Olivia’s plunges almost too uniformly successful.  But perhaps not; after all, while you are handling fairy-gold, why be niggardly of it?  The heroine’s introduction to horse-racing comes about through the unconscious agency of her husband, who takes her with him on a visit to Newmarket in search of local colour for a “sporting” novel.  The resulting situation reaches its climax in what is the best scene of the book, when Geoffrey, returning from a race that he has visited alone, but upon which Olivia, unknown to him, has risked thousands, recounts its progress in the best manner of realistic fiction, wholly ignorant of the true cause of what seems such flattering agitation in the listener.  Altogether a happy if not very subtle story which I am glad that Mr. Grant Richards could persuade himself to publish.

To write, as Mr. R.W.  Chambers has written, fifty-two novels, many of them excellent and all readable, while still on the right side of sixty, is an achievement of intelligent industry that entitles any novelist, at the latter end, to take matters a little easily. The Moonlit Way (Appleton) has neither the imaginative qualities of The King in Yellow, the humour of In Search of the Unknown, nor the adventurous tang of Ashes of Empire, but it is a good live story that will carry the reader’s interest to the last page.  Mr. Chambers is at his best when dealing with spies and secret service agents and scheming chancellors and the other subterranean apparatus of war and diplomacy; at his least interesting when depicting affluent young America on its native heath of New York bricks and mortar. The Moonlit Way deals with all these things and more.  We are whisked from the Bosphorus to the Welland Canal on the heels of Germany’s “War in the United States,” and French Secret Service officers, German saloon keepers and Sinn Fein revolutionaries jostle one another for a place in our interest.  The novel-reading public knows that it is quite safe in buying any story by Mr. Chambers, and, if it does not expect too much of The Moonlit Way, it will not be disappointed.