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who find their way to it'll never be turned aside.  You've got a giving hand, not a taking one."

And so it proved thru life.  Kate's wisdom, at times, might be questioned, but never her loyalty or her loving devotion; her entire unselfishness of spirit and unquestioning willingness to bear the burdens love put upon her.  "You'll work things out your own way in secret," was Old Lady Phibben's truthful forecast, "No one'll ever tell you what road to take.  You'll find it alone  and it won't be easy going."

Miss Field is equally skillful in her portrayal of Nat, an entirely different type of character—All fire and air as Kate was all earth," as Old Lady Phibben expressed it.

Nat was one of those people fated to be much loved and to bring sorrow and misfortune to those who loved him.  He kept two women from marriage to men who loved them and was miserable with the woman he married.  Yet, the author make it plain, he was not to blame, and he suffered even more himself than he made others suffer.

It was to Nat, from the night she first saw him, small and impish—"Everything peaked and startled about his face, brows like two black feathers above merry brown
eyes; tumbled spikes of dark hair and a small triangular chin," as she records her first impression—to the night of his death, that Kate gave her unfaltering devotion, welling up, fuller and deeper, in those months of his despair, when he had the most need of it.  
For him she sacrificed home and a life of security with Jake Bullard; the regard of her neighbors, her position in the community, and the affection of Rissa, her friend since childhood.

Yet there is no repining or bitterness of spirit in this woman who records so poignantly a life lived deeply, if not widely, when there is nothing left to look forward to.  "For it was a strange, high tide that took our three lives and flung them together, to mingle in salt and sun and the fierce currents of our youth.  I think there must always be Fortunes and Fernalds wherever there are people in the world whether they go by those names or not.''

Miss Field has given a memorable picture of the love between a sister and brother; the sister's protective and defiant in childhood; in maturity so all-absorbing and dominating that it stifled what it would have cherished.

              *        *       *

One of the finest thing about Miss Field's novel is its consistency.  Not a single note of inconsistency creeps into any one of the characters or their actions.  And, next, perhaps, comes the undeniable literary quality of the writing.  Miss Field has an unerring instinct for the right word and the right expression.  She can evoke memories as poignantly and as surely as can certain perfumes associated with one's past.  If her book is romance, who shall not say it is not also realism, for the scenes and the emotions it portrays are very real and true to life.  The bitter is mingled with the sweet in
large quantities, but it never embitters its heroine and it never becomes hopeless or sordid.

Surely, consistently and inevitably the story moves along to the dramatic trial in which Kate's action on the tragic night which is the story's climax, is vindicated.

Maine readers peruse the book with deep contentment.   The places, the vernacular, the people, the traditions, all are familiar.  We seem to be participants with her
in the evening launching of the "Rainbow," one of those events celebrated for miles up and down the coast, now forever past.  Some of the things described, like the launching, are seen thru the glamour of childish eyes; others thru the eyes of maturity, stripped
of all illusion.

Only once does the writer's eyes stray, in retrospect, from the salty pine lands, the shipyards and the tiny harbor village, to which Kate has persistently clung, and that is when she lives over again, in memory, that glorified and triumphant night in New York, when she saw Nat directing a great orchestra and swaying a whole theatre by the composition which she knew as did no other but its composer.

Sitting in her little room she fleets with calm conviction that "it would make Nat happy to know that sometimes they play his ''Ship Symphony,' it coming to me across miles of air from a far-away concert hall.  I knew when I heard the drums begin their familiar beat of hammers on wooden hulls, what I had known so surely that night of his concert and out there alone with him in the storm, that nothing which has ever stirred the heart can be lost to us."

Macmillan Co., New York, are publishers of the book.

E. B. W.
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